William Poundstone quotes

"Average" isn't so hot at the race track given those steep track takes. "Average" is pretty decent for stocks, something like 6 percent above the inflation rate. For a buy-and -hold investor, commissions and taxes are small. (William Poundstone)
Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science. View quote
William Poundstone
A bit is worth 10,000 basis points. View quote
William Poundstone
Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market. View quote
William Poundstone
There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon. View quote
William Poundstone
The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy. View quote
William Poundstone
Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children. View quote
William Poundstone
Bernoulli's real contribution was to coin a word. The word has been translated into English as "utility". It describes this subjective value people place on money. View quote
William Poundstone
Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway. View quote
William Poundstone
Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish. View quote
William Poundstone
At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox. (William Poundstone)
The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes. View quote
William Poundstone
The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke. View quote
William Poundstone
The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible. View quote
William Poundstone
Your second ducat, like your second million, is never quite as sweet. View quote
William Poundstone
The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails. View quote
William Poundstone
Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is. View quote
William Poundstone
Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant. View quote
William Poundstone
The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since. View quote
William Poundstone
In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other. View quote
William Poundstone
The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its improbability. (William Poundstone)
Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods. View quote
William Poundstone
There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this simple rule: When faced with a choice of wagers or investments, choose the one with the highest geometric means of outcomes. View quote
William Poundstone
Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are. View quote
William Poundstone
The dealer now theorized that Thorp was memorizing the entire deck. He knew exactly which cards remained in the deck and bet accordingly. Thorp said it was impossible for any one to do that. View quote
William Poundstone