William Poundstone Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

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.

William Poundstone
The problem with winning at blackjack and sports betting is that sooner or later a big guy in a suit tells you to leave.

William Poundstone
To hedge the bets he made every working day, Meriwether kept a set of rosary beads in his briefcase.

William Poundstone
The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.

William Poundstone
By the mid-1930s, Moe Annenburg was AT&T's fifth largest customer.

William Poundstone
Far from preventing gambler's ruin, martingale accelerates it.

William Poundstone
"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
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.

William Poundstone
In American culture the coin toss is the paradigm of the random event. A coin toss decides who kicks off the Super Bowl. Looked at another way, a coin toss is not random at all. It is physics.

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.

William Poundstone
The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.

William Poundstone
For reasons mathematical, psychological, and sociological, it is a good idea to use a money management system that is relatively forgiving of estimation errors.

William Poundstone
Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children.

William Poundstone
Your second ducat, like your second million, is never quite as sweet.

William Poundstone
At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.

William Poundstone
Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.

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.

William Poundstone
The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur—what species of impossibilities are possible.

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.

William Poundstone
In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.

William Poundstone
Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.

William Poundstone
Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.

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.

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
From Adam Smith through John Maynard Keynes, economics had been mostly talk. At Harvard economics was talk. At MIT, Samuelson made it math.

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.

William Poundstone
Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

William Poundstone
The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails.

William Poundstone
The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.

William Poundstone
Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant.

William Poundstone