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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

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William Poundstone
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: March 29
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Compared
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Shannon
Insight
Mit
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Others
Einstein
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Bell
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Unfair

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The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.
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Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children.
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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.
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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.
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The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.
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Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.
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People tend to be clueless about prices. Contrary to economic theory, we don't really decide between A and B by consulting our invisible price tags and purchasing the one that yields the higher utility, he says. We make do with guesstimates and a vague recollection of what things are “supposed to cost.”
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