Escaping the odds and a formula for life (2024)

Yet this article, like thousand others, don't go beyond binary decisions. Binary decisions are fine for many everyday decisions like figuring out whether to get insurance[1] but the Kelly criterion goes well beyond that[2] without changing the fundamentals: estimate a joint probability distribution of the outcome for each alternative, evaluate E(log X) using it, and pick the alternative for which it is highest.

For a deeper introduction, I recommend the somewhat heavy Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion[3] which is a well-curated collection of papers on the Kelly criterion and its various uses.

[1]: https://xkqr.org/insurance/?wealth=0&offered=0

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-misunderstood-kelly-criteri...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/KELLY-CAPITAL-GROWTH-INVESTMENT-CRITE...

I enjoyed the article, well written and engaging.

(It gave me a small sense of reading a recipe blog where the meta is to tell an enormous backstory)

I kind of sympathise with the premise of trying to somewhat soften the economic-worldview (and language) that we are so used to and to extrapolate into our day to day life.

But in the end it still talks about investing in my friends, and that just isn't for me.