Mike's notes.
January 14, 2020. Double Jeopardy Daily Double: Jeopardy is incredibly instructive. It has come up a number of times on the blog. The best summary is the June 2021 NPR Planet Money podcast. First, Jeopardy is not a trivia game. Jeopardy is a television show. It’s a game within a game within a game within… Continue reading The many games of Jeopardy
Michael Mauboussin introduced the Paradox of Skill as a condition where as skills improve luck becomes more important to determine who succeeds. For example, combine many very talented basketball players and you get something like Kawhi’s shot. The simplest way to think about the spectrum of luck to skill is to ask, ‘can I lose… Continue reading Jeopardy: Paradox of Skill
Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path. Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker is the story of IBM Watson, the Jeopardy champion who defeated Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. In December we looked at AI with posts from Andrew Ng, Paul Daugherty, Hal Varian, and Avi Goldfarb and Ajay Agrawal. The book… Continue reading Final Jeopardy
December 13 is the Survivor finale and a chance to highlight the different ideas of the blog. Sampling. These people are not “representative samples“. Survivor hosts a casting call for people with good stories. Like Bob Iger’s big lesson, entertainment isn’t about reporting so much as stories. Incentives. Like the many games of Jeopardy, Survivor… Continue reading Survivor Games
The common way to learn history is commonly politics, including war. This is not that. Suggestions? Send them over. These are affiliate links. If you buy anything from Amazon I will earn a small commission. Quips and gripes? Send them too. Cadbury [1824-Current] The Chocolate Wars. Chocolate. Simple right? Nope. It took a lot of… Continue reading History through Industry (I)
“I’ve grown accustomed to this type of (probabilistic) thinking because my background consists of experience in two disciplines; sports and poker, in which you’ll see pretty much everything at least once. Play enough poker hands and you’ll make your share of royal flushes. Play a few more and you’ll see your opponent has made a… Continue reading Poker’s Appeal?
To rephrase the aphorism then: If I can’t spot the fool at the table then the fool at the table is me — if all that matters is this game. In the chapter on The Poker Bubble, Nate Silvers writes that the paradox of skill can have a cascading effect. “The subtraction of fish from… Continue reading The Paradox of Skills Cascades
Beyond basic math, maybe units of ten, we don’t have a good handle on numbers. We are a story-telling species who likes to see cause and effect. The example of randomness demonstrates this as Maria Konnikova told Adi Wyner: “I had a fascinating conversation with Frank Lantz at the Game Center at NYU who used… Continue reading Our problem with randomness
One of the nice parts of distance learning and social distancing has been extra family time. Without commutes, commitments, and the common-chaos, things are kinda quieter. So we’ve been watching Survivor. I was a huge fan the first season. I was in college, online, and this was new. I kinda grew out of the show,… Continue reading Survivor Explains Sampling
I was reading a journal article. Well, actually I was skimming it. I now skim articles because there is a lot I don’t need to know. I only know this because Tyler Cowen told me so. When Cowen was asked how he can read so much he said something like, read for forty years. The… Continue reading A Need to Know Basis
The Waiter's Pad 