William Poundstone > Quotes

“Sometimes "creativity" is just common sense.”
― William Poundstone, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

“With apologies to the folks in Redmond, I’ll end on another Microsoft joke because it makes the point well (a point that applies everywhere, not just at Microsoft): A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of its electronic navigation and communications equipment. The clouds were so thick that the pilot couldn’t tell where he was. Finally, the pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said WHERE AM I? in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drawing their own large sign: YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER. The pilot smiled, looked at his map, determined the route to Sea-Tac Airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it. “I knew it had to be the Microsoft building,” he said, “because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”
― William Poundstone, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

“there’s no point in looking for hundred-dollar bills in the street. Why? Because, were there any hundred-dollar bills, someone would already have picked them up.”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

“Many people like myself who teach marketing start the course by saying, ‘We’re not about manipulating consumers, we’re about discovering needs and meeting them,’ ” said Eric Johnson of Columbia University. “And then, if you’re in the field awhile, you realize, yes, we can manipulate consumers.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“We choose between descriptions of options, rather than between the options themselves.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“One of the things that price consultants have learned is that what consumers say and what they do are not the same thing.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“It was like pulling the strings on a marionette. Huber and Puto found they could make the students want one beer or the other, just by adding a third choice that few or no one wanted.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“One portfolio is better than another one when it offers higher mean return for a given level of volatility—or a lower volatility for a given level of return.”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

“Science is not and cannot be a quest for a complete knowledge of the universe. Rather, it is a process whereby certain information is selected as being more relevant to human aims and understanding.”
― William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

“There is better reason than ever for believing that the structure and complexity of our world is inherent in our physical laws and not in some special, unknowable microstate. The universe is a recursively defined geometric object.”
― William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

“The strategy is to bet your entire bankroll each race, apportioning it among the horses according to your informed estimate of each horse’s chance of winning.”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

“The trouble is, these four domains of behavior coexist in all of us. A person who is risk-averse in one situation will turn reckless in another. All it takes is a changed reference point.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“Life is a sort of spreadsheet program in which each cell’s action is dictated by its neighbors.”
― William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

“The Edwardses raised dachshunds, one named Willy (after”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“One of Stevens’s epigrams ran, ‘Black is white with a bright ring around it.’ The Orwellian tone of that statement is justified. Stevens knew only too well that you can get people to believe almost anything about their own perceptions with a little sleight of hand. Subjectively, there are no absolutes, only contrasts.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“There are two ways of mentally representing money, one based on actual dollars and another based on buying power. Practically everyone knows that the first way is “wrong” whenever there’s inflation. But both representations command attention and both affect decisions, sometimes unconsciously. This suggests that the money illusion may be a form of anchoring.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations”
― William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge

“Past generations were most concerned with the material side of creation: How could something come from nothing? Cosmologists now recognize another, informational side of creation. Creation of a world entails above all information. The state of everything—everywhere—at every time—must be defined. The most economical way to specify such information is through a complexity-generating recursion of physical law.”
― William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

“The stumbling block isn't the certainty effect per se. It's the way that smart people are influenced by mere words, by the way the choices are framed.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“Authentic humans don’t show the perfect, chessmaster appreciation of consequences that von Neumann’s theory demands. Instead, decision makers resort to heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to arrive at quick, intuitive choices.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,”
― William Poundstone, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

“may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes,”
― William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge

“They note that the coherent arbitrariness of salaries is tacitly recognized in an old one-liner: A wealthy man is one who earns $100 more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch.”
― William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge

“Isn't human mind a funny thing? A bullet is a bullet, dead is dead. The reduction in probability of your demise is precisely the same in both cases. Why isn't your price the same?”
― William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value

“the way to get rich is to start a religion.)”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

“The best on horses you think will lose are a valuable "insurance policy." When rare disaster strikes, you'll be glad you had the insurance. 71

The exponential growth of wealth in the Kelly system is also a consequence of proportional betting. As the bankroll grows, make larger bets. 98

[2 questions are central to John Kelly's analysis] What level of risk will lead to the highest long-run return? What is the chance of losing everything? 286

As Fred Schwed, Jr. author of Where are the Customer's Yatchs? put it back in 1940, "Like all of life's rich emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed in literature." 304

Claude Shannon: A smart investor should understand where he has an edge and invest only in those opportunities. 308

The longer you hold a stock, the harder it is to beat the market by much. 316”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

“Judge Landis ultimately ruled that a federal judge had no jurisdiction over local antigambling statutes.”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration,”
― William Poundstone, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

“In 1894 Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patents expired. Within a few years, over 6,000 local telephone companies were competing for the U.S. market.”
― William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street