How to predict the Unpredictable.William Poundstone.

How to predict the Unpredictable.

The Art of Outsmarting Almost Everyone,

by William Poundstone.

 

Tim Harford의 서문에서:

“We’re often told that the world is impossibly random. Poundstone’s enjoyable and original book shows that once people get involved, we make it gar more predictable than we realize...

 

Poundstone takes as his foundation the simple idea that human beings struggle to dream up genuinely random sequences. He shows that this insight applies widely, from choosing a secure password to detecting financial fraud. After reading Poundstone you’ll win at scissors-paper-stone, guess where the goalkeeper will leap as the penalty kick is taken, and bluff your way through a multiple choice test.

 

p8. one was that human actions are often highly predictable.

 

p10... that people are predictable when they try not to be.

 

P15. All of us are constantly trying to predict the actions of others, while reserving some unpredictability for ourselves.

 

P20. ..Algorithm..It serves as an uncomfortable reminder of how mechanical our desires and decisions can be.

 

p23. All of this book’s applications are founded on one simple idea. When people make arbitrary, random, or strategic choices, thet fall into unconscious patterns that you can predict.

 

p75. 10 20 29 30 32 38

39 40 41 42 48 49

p146. The rule should perhaps be reworded: Never invest more than yiu can afford to lose in something no outsider understands. Many of Mandoff’s victims violated that rule, putting practically all their assets with him.

 

p158. You’re in a world all your own. It's hard to describe. But the basket seems to be so wide. No matter what you do, you know the ball is going to go in.

 

P160. A player’s talent determined the overall probability of making baskets, but otherwise, winning streaks were no longer than to be expected by chance.. the hot hand was an illusion.

 

p168. Tversky and kahneman’s law of small numbers is a rule of psychology. It says that we unreasonably expect small samples to reflect the underlying odds.

 

p170. Did you hear the one about the optimist who fell of the Empire State Building? After falling fifty floors, he said, “So far, so good!!”.... In an influential 1972 paper, Kahneman and Tversky argued that many of our informal estimates of probability are based on representativeness. Their method was to survey people, describing hypothetical situations and asking them to estimate probabilities. They found that people were wrong in consistent ways.,, the real message is that we all make intuitive judgements of probability.

 

p216. He had a theory that a nation’s economic health could be divined from the length of discarded cigarette butts. When people were feeling wealthy, they left longer butts. Another leading inducator was the hygiene in houses of prostitution.

After several months of fact finding, Keely reported that Thailand was A-OK. Niederhoffer invested, and in 2007 the Thai economy collapsed. He lost his clients’ money and much of his own.

 

Epilogue

 

“At the same time it's thrilling, do you find there’s this fear of anxiety...tht creeps up the back of your spine into yur skull? You think, this is so wonderful, I don’t want it to come to an end?”.... they vanish like smoke.

 

Fate-monstrous

and empty,

you whirling wheel,

you are malevolent,

well-being is vain

and always fades to nothing.

-Carmina Burana-

 

To understand the misperception of randomness is to gain power, not over fate but over ourselves.

 

2015.9월 初秋, 생각에 갇힌 [鎭]