The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage)
by Leonard Mlodinow
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leonard MlodinowEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-05
ISBN: 0307275175
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307275172
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage)
Book Review: How our life is inevitably immersed in randomness and what to do about it!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent book on randomness and how it is related to day to day results. If you were raised in a western culture, specially if you were raised in a goal oriented individual-achievement-based society, chances are high that you will dislike several parts of the book and that you will disagree with the author. Never mind, read it anyhow, I even recommend that you read those parts again. This book explains that a mere good player can achieve excellent or even extraordinary scores in a season due to randomness (the same as he could perform very poorly). The same happens in fact to management. When managers have one or several bad periods after having performed greatly, this does not mean that they have lost their skills, it can merely be the effect of randomness. This is tough to swallow when we strongly believe, no in fact when you (like myself) are sure that our actions determine our results and that we and only we are the ones responsible for our success or failure. In fact, what annoyed me most was that I thought the author was claiming that a medium player (or manager) and a good or excellent one had the same chances of success, he even said that the outcome of every specific game or period was like tossing a coin. Imagine your kid telling you he had a bad grade, "but don't worry, the teacher said it was random..."
This is why I say I recommend you to re-read carefully those annoying sections. The author is NOT saying that they have the same chance of success, the better player has a higher probability of succeeding, but a medium one (not a specific one, but one among several medium players), has also a chance of having exceptional "luck" and eventually outperform the better player, specially if it is combined with an exceptional "bad luck" of the better player. You might feel this is disencouraging but no, on the contrary. This only means you need to work harder to increase your probability of winning, to reduce your probability of loosing (making the gap wider), to reduce variability or whatever seems most suited in the specific circumstance and most important that you should not give up, never give up. The key is to understand that even if randomness affects each and every specific game or period, the same randomness is also responsible for the "Law of large numbers" which ensures that in the accumulated average the better prevails (even if every result is random, the more often you play, the closer the outcome will be to the true probability of winning). This is why some sports require that you win a specific number of games or matches in each set or row. For more on probability and games read Taking Chances: Winning with Probability, specially if you would like to do some calculations on your own. Recently I have read a definition of natural selection as "survival of the luckiest", since some "historical accidents" and "genetic drift" are due to mere chance (See Genes, Peoples, and Languages). However this "historical accidents" need to proof themselves on a day to day basis, maybe it's more like a mix "survival of the luckiest among the fit ones or of the fittest among the lucky ones" - I don't know.
This book is brilliantly simple. If you are unfamiliar with probability and statistics or if like myself, you feel you do not really understand the underlying principles, make sure to read this book before reading more complex literature on the subject. If you already know the math, but you would like to read interesting cases applied to day to day situations like the statistical mistakes made by juries in trials or the ones made by doctors when interpreting laboratory tests or if you would like to know interesting anecdotes in the history of probability, this book is also strongly recommended. I had already read some (in fact many) of the anecdotes in previous literature, but I found the specific pieces of information provided by Mr. Mlodinow to be more relevant to a clear understanding. Maybe it is just that after reading about probability in different books, the Info finally got digested like ("Ahhhh, now I get it..."), but I rather think that the language and examples Mr. Mlodinow uses are easier to understand. If you would like to actually do some math, this book is not the one, since it has basically no formulas.
Summary of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage)
With 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.
Amazon Guest Review: Stephen Hawking
Published in 1988, Stephen Hawking?s A Brief History of Time became perhaps one of the unlikeliest bestsellers in history: a not-so-dumbed-down exploration of physics and the universe that occupied the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. Later successes include 1995?s A Briefer History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, and God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History. Stephen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
In The Drunkard?s Walk Leonard Mlodinow provides readers with a wonderfully readable guide to how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives. With insight he shows how the hallmarks of chance are apparent in the course of events all around us. The understanding of randomness has brought about profound changes in the way we view our surroundings, and our universe. I am pleased that Leonard has skillfully explained this important branch of mathematics. --Stephen Hawking Biological Sciences Books
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