Quotes from Michael Lewis

road, then set out in different directions: Coryell went deep and Walsh went wide. In Coryell's system, the

Eighteen months after Netscape was created, and before it had made a dime, Netscape sold shares in itself to the public. On the first day of trading the price of those shares rose from $12 apiece to $48. Three months later it was at $140. It was one of the most successful share offerings in the history of the U.S. stock markets, and possibly the most famous.

is creating problems for bureaucrats who suffer from malignant obedience.

How did a person decide how much sugar to put in his tea? Well, he had some notion of the ideal sweetness of tea; he sugared his tea until it most closely resembled that ideal.

You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at, and what humans are good and bad at," said Morey. Humans sometimes had access to information that the model did not, for instance.

These Ginnie Maes suck. They get longer [in maturity] when rates go up, and shorter when rates go down, and nobody wants them

There was, Carter thought, a downside to experience. "Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence

Never mind that you weren't actually making money—there'd be time for that later, assuming someone eventually figured out how to make money from the Internet. For the moment you needed to plow all of your revenues back into growth. You had to show that you were the company not of the present but of the future.

The triple of Jeremy Brown's imagination, in reality, is a home run.

The most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility.

The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails.

earlier the restrictions imposed in any given outbreak, the fewer the deaths.

Between 1845 and 1852 the country experienced the single greatest loss of population in world history: in a nation of 8 million, 1.5 million people left. Another million Irish people starved to death, or died from the effects of hunger. Inside of a decade the nation went from being among the most densely populated in Europe to one of the least.

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

Even the fairest coin, however, given the limitations of its memory and moral sense, cannot be as fair as the gambler expects it to be," they wrote. In an academic journal that line counted as a splendid

In a thousand subtle and unsubtle ways they were reinventing the experience of living on board a boat.

If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a cold, hard look at these crappy assets they're holding with borrowed money, and imagine what they'd fetch in a fire sale.

Paul Meehl wrote in a famous 1986 essay, "Psychology: Does Our Heterogeneous Subject Matter Have Any Unity?

For some reason human beings did not see it that way. "People's intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well," Danny and Amos wrote.

When you go into the details of the cases, you see it's not bad people," he said. "It's bad systems. When the systems depend on human vigilance, they will fail.

Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist on CBS's Maryland affiliate, wrote. "This kind of thing should be condemned, and if you have an AccuWeather app on your smartphone, my advice is to stand up for science and replace it.

Asked to guess what it might cost the U.S. government to return Hanford to the standards now legally required of it, MacWilliams said, "A century and a hundred billion dollars." And that, he thought, might be a conservative estimate.

But because he has misjudged how large the sample needs to be if it is to stand a good chance of reflecting the entire population, he is at the mercy of luck.

One measure of poverty is how little you have. Another is how difficult you find it to take advantage of what others try to give you.