Book Review: Rock Breaks Scissors by Poundstone

 http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Breaks-Scissors-Outguessing-Outwitting/dp/1491531185

This is the third book I have read recently that is about forecasting (see here and here for the previous two).

Poundstone did a pretty good job overall. The first chapter of the book is a general discussion on the human psychology of perceiving randomness. The following one half gives specific examples of how to outperform in various more light-hearted and trivial prediction exercises (e.g. multiple choice tests, rock-paper-scissors, passwords etc.), and the remaining one half does the same thing but with more serious topics (e.g. sports betting, web big data, stock market etc.).

Once again I'll try to distill the essence of the book here:

1. The human mind is handicapped in creating and detecting randomness
2. We can take advantage of the above in many situations for a statistically significant gain
3. In situations where randomness rules, the real pros do not care so much about views; they care more about odds