Quotes from William Poundstone

Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway.

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.

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.

Sometimes "creativity" is just common sense.

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.

One of the things that price consultants have learned is that what consumers say and what they do are not the same thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When people are given three prices (think of those for small, medium, and large coffee), and they have no strong preference, they tend to pick the "middle" price. Morgan

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration

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.

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?

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.

The assumption that anything true is knowable is the grandfather of paradoxes.

And blanket skepticism can lead one as far astray as blanket credibility can.

We choose between descriptions of options, rather than between the options themselves.

Flipping the gains to losses flips the types of behavior. When losses are likely, reckless gambles become acceptable (lower left cell).

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.

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.

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.