Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

Here things became tricky. The trader might have anticipated that Sam would have this thought. The trader might have intentionally asked a question that he had no special reason to ask, just to trick Sam. Here was just another aspect of the puzzle: you had to figure out how many levels down you should go before you should stop thinking. Sam decided, as he nearly always did, that more than one level down was too clever by half. It was far more likely that the guy had some reason to ask the question than that he did not. He didn’t know by exactly how much, but the mere fact the trader had asked the question shifted the odds that he had a relative who played pro baseball to something better than one in a thousand. “That was the other thing he was testing for,” said Sam. “Did I realize that there was information in the question I was asked?”