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William Poundstone
33 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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur—what species of impossibilities are possible.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By the mid-1930s, Moe Annenburg was AT&T's fifth largest customer.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Far from preventing gambler's ruin, martingale accelerates it.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A bit is worth 10,000 basis points.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone; the stock market.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your second ducat, like your second million, is never quite as sweet.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To hedge the bets he made every working day, Meriwether kept a set of rosary beads in his briefcase.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ultimate compound return rate is acutely sensitive to fat tails.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1955) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William Poundstone (born 1955) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Recursive Universe (1985), p. 31