David Sumpter's Ten Equations

Stand up straight and never lie

Eat the right things and you'll never die

Don't give a *k and you'll always be happy

Do it now and make it snappy.

Cute doggerel.

1. The judgement equation - using Bayes theorem in your life to give yourself and others a break

2. The Betting equation - Marius and Jan - exploit the fact that majority of bookies are soft. These same bookies also limit (to a ridiculous amount like $2) how much you can bet once they figure out that you're a winner. So, these guys offer a subscription service to sell their smarts. Patty Power, Ladbrokes, William Hill are soft - also Red Bet and 888 Sport - prioritize special offers. Pinnacle and Matchbook are "share" bookies - who can fine tune odds to truly reflect probabilities of outcomes - these are used by the other 1% of gamblers. Arbitrage - use odds from the sharpies to cream money from the softies. Use the edge. 

With 7:5 odds, you will lose 4%. 

Search for best parameters using logistic regression. 

Sir David Cox - 96 at time of Sumpter's writing - discoverer of the betting equation. Proponent of logistic regression. "What was the best way of predicting how an outcome was affected by various factors?"

William Benter - applying coding to horse race betting to make $1 billion. Computer Based Horse Racing and Handicapping Systems. Benter's required reading : Bolton, Ruth N. and Randall G. Chapman, "Searching for Positive Returns at the Track: A Multinomial Legit Model for Handicapping Horse Races," Management Science, Vol. 32, No. 8, August (1986), 1040-1059.

From Forbes' Blackjack Ball : Nicholos Colon - Max Rubin - Blair Hull - James Grosjean - Rick Blain - Zeljko "the joker" Ranogajec (at one time had a staff of 300 analysts)

Blair Hull : The first thing you have to do is memorize this chart, which is very easy to do (😊) (Be systematic and disciplined!)

Rick : Treat the people that work for you as partners rather than employees. Only when you get to know them as a person can you truly understand what motivates them and, in turn get their best out of them.

Other tidbits : how a social media personality named Clements or Clemens used a picture suggesting she was pregnant to test which pictures were successful online. 

If you're starting up a business, you should have lots of small ideas rather than one big idea. Then, use AB testing.

Wolfram Schultz : discovered that dopamine neurons are activated by rewarding events that are better than predicted.

1960 Rudolph E Kalman published paper showing how noise in the variables could be reliably filtered out to reveal the true signal. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.04055.pdf

Irmgard Flugge-Lotz : Originator of bang bang control.

You should relax without your phone. Pay no attention to the news or the endless stack of CC'd emails. Don’t worry. Someone else will take care of it. (*) It doesn’t have to be about you all the time. Reward equation tells you to dwell and focus on the present and not dwell on the past. Keep track of where you are with a single number in it head. 

Make sure you spot the difference between stable rewards that keep on giving I’ll be at sporadically and unstable rewards that change their nature over time.

Stable rewards :

• Friendships and relationships
• Books tv and films
• Long walks and fishing
• 2048 and Pokémon Go

Unstable rewards :

• Social media, looking for dates on tinder (tell me about this!), jobs
• Family life

* reminds me of Feynman in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" : 

von Neumann explained to me that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you're in, and so I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann's advice. It’s made me a very happy man since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in which grew now into my active irresponsibility!