William Poundstone Quotes

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

"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.

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

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.

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

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.

Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children.

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.

A bit is worth 10,000 basis points.

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

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.

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

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