William Poundstone
William Poundstone is an American author, columnist, and skeptic.
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.
The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.
Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.
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.
There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon.
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.
The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails.
Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.
Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.
The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.
The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.
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.
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.
At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.
In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.
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.
By the mid-1930s, Moe Annenburg was AT&T's fifth largest customer.
Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.
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.
Far from preventing gambler's ruin, martingale accelerates it.