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William Poundstone


William Poundstone is an American author, columnist, and skeptic.
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.
Poundstone quotes
The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.
Poundstone
Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.




Poundstone William quotes
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.
Poundstone William
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 quotes
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
The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails.
Poundstone William quotes
Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.
Poundstone
Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.
Poundstone William
The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.
William Poundstone
The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.




William Poundstone quotes
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 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.
Poundstone quotes
At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.
Poundstone William
In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.
Poundstone William quotes
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
By the mid-1930s, Moe Annenburg was AT&T's fifth largest customer.
William Poundstone quotes
Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.
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.
Poundstone William
Far from preventing gambler's ruin, martingale accelerates it.


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