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The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
| Title | The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-10-18 08:03:24 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, an intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives that will intrigue, awe, and inspire.“Mlodinow writes in a breezy style, interspersing probabilistic mind-benders with portraits of theorists.... The result is a readable crash course in randomness.” — The New York Times Book ReviewWith the born storyteller's command of narrative and imaginative approach, Leonard Mlodinow vividly demonstrates how our lives are profoundly informed by chance and randomness and how everything from wine ratings and corporate success to school grades and political polls are less reliable than we believe.By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.
Review
The Drunkard’s Walk is a book about randomness, a topic that most people, unless they happen to be mathematicians or have a strange fascination with statistics, probably don’t think too much about. As a species, in fact, we generally prefer not to dwell on randomness, but rather to assume that we are in control of much more of our lives than we actually are. In this new book, physicist Leonard Mlodinow attempts to show why underestimating randomness is really not a good idea. He lays a foundation for this discussion by outlining the development of mathematical and scientific thought on the topic. When humans assumed all outcomes were due to the whims of the gods, there was no need for a concept of randomness. But that didn’t stop gamblers from trying to improve their odds in games of chance, and it is to them we owe a debt of understanding on the topic.Mlodinow spices up some rather technical discussions about development of the theory with interesting personal history of the major players (including a guy who figured out his baker was cheating customers by compulsively weighing his bread for a year and noting the differences from random distribution) and numerous fascinating studies on the topic. Along the way, he makes a compelling argument that the human propensity to see patterns where there are none can get us into a great deal of trouble, as anyone who has ever lost money in the stock market has probably figured out. It’s not just gamblers and investors who would benefit from understanding these concepts, however. Mlodinow also shows how misunderstandings of randomness and statistics can affect jury trials and medical studies and makes a compelling argument that the success of an individual business is usually far more impacted by randomness than it is by the personal talents of the CEO or movie studio head.Much of what Mlodinow discusses in this book is highly counterintuitive. That, combined with the above mentioned desire to believe we are masters of our fate, explains in part why we so often underestimate the effect of randomness on our lives. But acknowledging the power of randomness does not disempower us, Mlodinow argues. Rather, it allows us to focus on the aspects of our lives over which we really do have control, such as how persistent we are, and not take so personally the random luck--both good and bad--that touches all of us.
