Status Updates From Rock Breaks Scissors: A Pra...

I finally finished - the end was a very large section on stocks and the workings of the market and depressions, which was very interesting but most of it went over my head. I tried to apply what I learned with PE rates to real life stocks, but the numbers were wildly off what they were supposed to be, so I might try in the future.

Started the last topic, which is on the stock market, and while it is very hard to understand a lot of what he says it is very interesting as to how different theories work. I'm not 100% sure I understand PE values, because he talks as if high is good, but it's also bad and you want to buy at low and sell when it gets too low.

Insights into how predictive science works, with discounts for companies and magic tricks on stage are very interesting. I would like more examples though, as it seems to be trying to speed up and rush as the book is ending.

I've never heard of the "hot hand" theory, but the fact that we prefer streaks in human subjects and underpredict streaks in mechanical subjects does make sense - we see machines as "random" and we are horrible at truly understanding randomness. The law of small numbers was very funny, especially in the way it was phrased.

Seems like some information would be dated, especially considering password research and the newfound speed at which machines can break them. Learning about Benford's law is absurdly weird, and it's hard to wrap my head around why it works, although I do understand that $2,000,000,000 is much harder to reach than $1,000,000,000. Nigrini's research on the topic is also interesting, but I have yet to see where it goes.

The book gave me some interesting thoughts about my own lack of randomness -- I follow a pattern in a random setting and now I can fix it. I didn't think that such a large percentage of "all of the above" answers on tests would be right, but the explanation that those answers basically need to built around makes a lot of sense - the statistic that scissors is picked first in a game of RPS 29% of the time is also fun.

Finally finished the prologue - interesting how predictable humans really are. The anecdote about the man and his pregnant daughter in Minnesota really showed how disconnected from reality we all are.

Odd history so far, interesting to see how revolutionary the machine was at the time... not seeing where it is going and how it will help me "outguess" other people, as the cover claims.