Skyscrapers 'linked with impending financial crashes' (BBC)

[cthulu2016]

2. This is a classic fallacy

If we assume that depressions cause some builidng projects to be cancelled and others to be never conceived then of course big building projects will cluster around the peaks before the troughs.

There's no way around it!

This is like the "Sports Illustrated Curse." A lot of atheletes think it bad luck to be on the cover of sports illustrated because poor performance often follows that honor. It would, however, be truer to say that lousy performance never precedes that honor.

Sports Illusrated puts people on the cover for things like winning ten tournaments in a row. Of course performance drops off. It's reversion to the mean.

If Sports Illustrated covers tended to feature teams who have lost ten straight games then it would appear to be a predictor of future relative success. (This is not the gambler's fallacy of thinking that if you flip heads ten times that tails is likelier than usual on the next flip. The gambler's fallacy is thinking that previous flips affect the next flip, but you could phrase it this way: If you just flipped ten heads in a row then the odds are overwhelming that your next ten flips will contain more tails than your previous ten flips did, because we already know that the last ten flips were an unusual sequence. You are very likely to get "better" at flipping tails than you have been.)