If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favours nor your hate.
It’s not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it — who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet — that they can occasionally find one.
Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. It’s not that he’s so smart that he always knows the right answer. He just plays the odds better.
