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Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody, by William Poundstone
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A practical guide to outguessing everything from multiple-choice tests to the office football pool to the stock market.
People are predictable even when they try not to be. William Poundstone demonstrates how to turn this fact to personal advantage in scores of everyday situations, from playing the lottery to buying a home. ROCK BREAKS SCISSORS is mind-reading for real life.
Will the next tennis serve go right or left? Will the market go up or down? Most people are poor at that kind of predicting. We are hard-wired to make bum bets on "trends" and "winning streaks" that are illusions. Yet ultimately we're all in the business of anticipating the actions of others. Poundstone reveals how to overcome the errors and improve the accuracy of your own outguessing. ROCK BREAKS SCISSORS is a hands-on guide to turning life's odds in your favor.
- Sales Rank: #397902 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-08
- Released on: 2015-09-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .88" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From Booklist
The title makes it sound kind of like one of those shady get-rich-quick books, but this is, in fact, a smart, engagingly written account of how to capitalize on other peoples’ predictability (while at the same time, if we’re paying attention, minimize our own predictability). With the smooth readability of John Allen Paulos, whose Innumeracy (1988) has some thematic similarities, Poundstone explores how our tendencies toward uniformity and simplicity, even when we think we’re being random and complex, leave us open to exploitation by people who know more than we do, like the fact that, when asked to pick one object out of five lined up in a row, most people will pick the second or fourth, or that, in the game rock/paper/scissors, most men choose rock, and scissors is the least popular choice by both genders. There’s some mathematics here—the author explains what he’s talking about in detail—but it’s clearly explained and easily accessible to the general reader. An enlightening book, though, sadly, much of the enlightenment comes from realizing that we’re not as clever as we thought we were. --David Pitt
Review
"An ingenious guide to outsmarting others by predicting their choices when they are trying to be unpredictable." -- Kirkus (Starred Review)
"Of all of the books I've received for The Post, none has received as much over-the-shoulder reads than ROCK BREAKS SCISSORS."
―Susannah Callahan, The New York Post
Praise for Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? "Poundstone displays his scientific knowledge, mathematical fluency, and knack for explaining the arcane in playfully precise sentences."―Bloomberg Businessweek
"A smart, engagingly written account of how to capitalize on other peoples' predictability . . . clearly explained and easily accessible to the general reader. An enlightening book."―Booklist
"Delightful, fun, and worth a read."―Seth Godin
"Incredibly gratifying....There's an art to these invasive questions, as Poundstone reveals in this neat little manifesto."―New Scientist
About the Author
William Poundstone is the author of thirteen previous books, including Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, and Fortune's Formula. He has written for the New York Times, Harper's, Harvard Business Review, and the Village Voice, among other publications, and is a frequent guest on TV and radio. He lives in Los Angeles. Follow Poundstone on Twitter (@WPoundstone) and learn more at his website, home.williampoundstone.net.
Most helpful customer reviews
50 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent topic and well explained
By CK
Although I am engineer and read a fair number of science books, this is the first time I have ever come across this topic which is a cross between number theory and behavioral economics. I found it very illuminating and well presented and not at all disorganized as the previous reviewer states. And I don't think a book should get a one star merely because another book covered the material well. The value of a book is how much the reader benefited from it.
I am very intrigued by the topic as it brings together, game theory, number theory, and probability theory. Well done. Like it.
Charan Langton complextoreal.com
Added: I went back and looked at "machines that think" just out of curiosity. This is a book about history of artificial intelligence and in particular about the progress made in AI at a particular place (Dartmouth) and time (70's). The comparison is quite not appropriate. Now AI is a huge topic, far bigger than what this book is attempting to cover and describe that is the human biases and tendencies towards certain numbers particularly in light thresholds and constraints. When humans cheat they cheat in predictable ways, very much along what Dan Arielly talks about in his very excellent book "Predictably Irrational".
The book discusses the Benford's Law, also called the First-Digit Law, which is the frequency distribution of digits in real data such as financial, tax returns, etc. In this distribution, the number 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, while larger numbers occur in that position less frequently: 9 as the first digit less than 5% of the time. This law can be used to determine if the data being examined has been faked which tends to deviate from this distribution significantly. This because no matter how hard we try, we humans are unable to create truly random sequences of digits. We have too many predictable biases for certain numbers and in our attempt to appear non-random create patently non-random numbers be it on tax returns or others data such as faked experiment results. The author talks about in addition to out biases about certain numbers but also orders in which we pick things making "magic tricks" possible.
So I am sticking to my rating.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Gaining a slight edge
By David J. Aldous
Neither this US title nor the UK title "How to predict the unpredictable" is very informative. Better is the author’s declaration “All of this book’s applications are founded on one simple idea. When people make arbitrary, random or strategic choices, they fall into unconscious patterns that you can predict.” But here “predict” is much too strong — ``gain a slight edge” is more indicative.
There are 19 short chapters and one long one. One recurrent theme is that when opponents should randomize actions — tennis serves, soccer penalty kicks, poker bluffing, and of course rock-paper-scissors — they tend to avoid making the same action two or three times in succession; anticipating this gives you an edge. Another theme is exploiting observed non-uniformity; in lottery number choices or in answer options on multiple choice tests. Another theme is detection of manipulation or outright falsification of financial data, detectable by Benford’s (first digit) law or by occurrence of numbers just on the desirable side of some significant threshold. A final theme is inspired by the “hot hand” phenomenon, which all sports players and most sports spectators believe in, but which statisticians have debunked. So can you exploit others’ erroneous belief? One idea involves “betting on the underdog” systems which people have derived from past data, though the author seems unduly credulous about their future reliability.
The style — fast-paced short paragraphs in large type — makes very easy reading. And because there is no very comparable book, I am happy to recommend it to anyone interested in these topics out of general curiosity. Though to what extent this material will be actually useful to a typical reader, I find hard to guess.
The final long chapter on the stock market has more substance. The conventional academic view is that you should “buy and hold the market” via a low-expense index fund, rather than pay for professional management (incurring fees for no demonstrable benefit) or engage in some trading strategy of your own invention (typically seriously underperforming the market). The author advocates seeking to beat ``buy and hold” via long-cycle market timing, in particular the Shiller system of buying when market PE (based on last 10 years earnings) falls to some low threshold and selling when it rises to some high threshold. This system is supported by both logic and historical data, though being a ``whole lifetime” strategy I imagine that few people are psychologically prepared to adopt and persist with this one strategy for much of a lifetime.
A few minor quibbles. The advice on choosing passwords is sensible but omits the arguably better xkcd “correct_horse_battery_staple” (4 moderately common words strung together) idea and does not emphasize using a password strength checker. The advice on interpreting product ratings — look at the proportion of 5/5 ratings instead of the average rating — doesn’t seem based on any actual evidence. The discussion of Benford’s law admirably admits its misuse but doesn’t emphasize the main mathematical point, that it only applies to data with a rather wide range of values.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A Guide on Getting the Upper Hand
By bronx book nerd
This is an interesting and entertaining book that provides different tips and advice on how to get the upper hand in certain situations, everything from playing rock-paper-scissors to March Madness bracket pools to the stock market. Poundstone begins by telling the story of how one person creating an out-guessing machine that basically could figure out picking patterns by humans. The revelation there is that people tend to create predictable patterns when they try to create random series. This is the biggest take away. When we think of something random, we almost automatically assume that this rules out repetition, whereas the repetition of numbers can be a random outcome (it just doesn't "look" that way to most people). This tendency is exhibited in many different fields, and can be used to identify fraudulent numbers, for example, because people tend to favor and disfavor certain numbers when they are making up data. Poundstone provides tips on how to pick lottery numbers that are more likely to garner a bigger share (if you win) and how to win football bets that involve spreads. The material is fascinating and reinforces a lot of findings from behavioral economics, such as the representative heuristic, for example, but more important, reinforces the fact that people stubbornly believe what they want to believe against all evidence.
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