Quotes from William Poundstone

It was like pulling the strings on a marionette. Huber and Puto found they could make the students want one beer or the other, just by adding a third choice that few or no one wanted.

Complexity is self-generating. The diversity of our world is understandable because it is possible to design imaginary self-consistent worlds potentially as complex as our own.     This is no mere restatement of common sense. Everyone daydreams alternate worlds, but the imagination soon tires of filling in details. Ulam, Von Neumann, and Conway showed that a few recursive rules can paint in all the details. Creation can be simple.

There are two ways of mentally representing money, one based on actual dollars and another based on buying power. Practically everyone knows that the first way is "wrong" whenever there's inflation. But both representations command attention and both affect decisions, sometimes unconsciously. This suggests that the money illusion may be a form of anchoring.

One of Stevens's epigrams ran, 'Black is white with a bright ring around it.' The Orwellian tone of that statement is justified. Stevens knew only too well that you can get people to believe almost anything about their own perceptions with a little sleight of hand. Subjectively, there are no absolutes, only contrasts.

There are those who seize advantages because they think they can get away with it, and others who find their only bargaining chip to be a self-destructive veto. In a real sense, we all play the ultimatum game.

In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch.

may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes

he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations

In view of this, it may seem remarkable that anything as complex as a text of Hamlet exists. The observation that Hamlet was written by Shakespeare and not some random agency only transfers the problem. Shakespeare, like everything else in the world, must have arisen (ultimately) from a homogeneous early universe. Any way you look at it, Hamlet is a product of that primeval chaos.

Life is a sort of spreadsheet program in which each cell's action is dictated by its neighbors.

Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero.