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Use entropy and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what entropy is.

William Poundstone

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William Poundstone
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: March 29
Author
Biographer
Journalist
Debate
Lose
Told
Loses
Use
Really
Never
Shannon
Entropy

More quotes by William Poundstone

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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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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.
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A bit is worth 10,000 basis points.
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Shannon's most radical insight was that meaning was irrelevant.
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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
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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.
William Poundstone
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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
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In real conversations, we are always trying to outguess each other.
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In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
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The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.
William Poundstone
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The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur-what species of impossibilities are possible.
William Poundstone
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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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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
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Kelly was aware that there is one type of favorable bet available to everyone the stock market.
William Poundstone
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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.”
William Poundstone
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The best strategy is one that offers the highest compound return consistent with no risk of going broke.
William Poundstone
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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.
William Poundstone
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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
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The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.
William Poundstone
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At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox.
William Poundstone