Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

Sam. He hated the way inherently probabilistic situations would be interpreted, after the fact, as having been black-and-white, or good and bad, or right and wrong. So much of what made his approach to life different from most people’s was his willingness to assign probabilities and act on them, and his refusal to be swayed by any after-the-fact illusion that the world had been more knowable than it actually was. The missing Ripple reminded him of a favorite thought experiment. “You have a close friend, Bob,” he explained. “He’s great. You love him. Bob is at a house party where someone gets murdered. No one knows who the murderer is. There are twenty people there. None are criminals. But Bob is less likely in your mind than anyone else to have killed someone. But you can’t say that there is a zero chance Bob killed someone. Someone got killed, no one knows who did it. You now think there’s like a one percent chance Bob did it. How do you see Bob now? What is Bob to you? And there is no updating: there is no new information about Bob.”