The Fish Market

Let's imagine an exotic fish market, where fish are kept alive in a display tank until just before they are sold so that they can be eaten when fresh. The store has high prices, high overhead, and low volume, leading to very thin profit margins.

This market has in its employ a small but very vocal group of Cassandras who periodically announce that a fish is about to die, although all the fish are cruising around the tank as usual. This group consists of:

• Employees who don't have enough to do and are always looking for things that are not quite right. They are never taken to task if their predictions don't come true. So they predict all kinds of things with great abandon, hitting it right every once in awhile just because of statistical probability. The signal-to-noise ratio for these people is very low, so usually the owner can safely ignore them.

• A few individuals who actually can see what's coming and aren't afraid to speak up. Provided that the owner can distinguish these folks from the first subgroup, they can be useful to him, but they are not always right, either.