About book Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide To Outguessing And Outwitting Almost Everybody (2014)
Based on the subtitle, this book falls a little short, although I did enjoy reading it. Much of the book gives you tips on how to improve your odds (sometimes only slightly) in certain situations.I did like the Prologue where Poundstone tells the story of the outguessing machine. Most of the rest of the book tells you how to get an advantage over an opponent in various situations. The Rock, Paper, Scissors discussion was fun and would probably help you prevail in that game, but really, how often does that come up? Other situations might be more common. He gives a few tips for outguessing tennis serves, multiple choice tests, and the office football/basketball pool, just to name a few. There are a few chapters on spotting faked or manipulated numbers - an interesting discussion but kind of limited in practical applicability for most people.A few sections were confusing. In the chapter about outguessing home prices, he uses this formula:Home Price x ( 1 - ( CPI / CS x 1.698 ) )CPI is the Consumer Price Index, and CS is the Case-Shiller Index for your area, and the 1.698 is the CPI in the year 2000 divided by 100. Even though he explains this formula, I still found it confusing why you would always use 1.698 and not some other number if your time period was different.Each chapter has a summary, which was very useful and helps make the book more useful.Bottom line, in my opinion, if you don't expect too much from this book, I think you'll enjoy it. Rock Breaks Scissors is more than just how to outwit at RPS. It goes into much more detail in a variety of topics such as sports, the Oscars and finance. The book kept me intrigued and wanting to learn how to outguess in even more areas. I also really appreciated the mini summaries that he had at the end of each chapter as a "cliff note" to how to outguess.I would recommend this book to anyone who's into probability and/or behavioral economics. It's really interesting to learn how predictable humans are, such as how men tend to favor rock. I will definitely be picking up more of William Poundstone's books.
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Slightly interesting but too many chapters focusing on sports.
—autumn
Fargo Public - Main Library Adult NonFiction : 303.49 P876
—okiebugeater
Good toilet reading, I guess. Too light for me.
—NaomiJoyce
