The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow
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List Price: ££20.00
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Manufacturer: Allen Lane
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780713999228
ISBN: 0713999225
Label: Allen Lane
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2008-05-29
Publisher: Allen Lane
Studio: Allen Lane
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Let us not be outperformed by a rat
Comment: I was surprised to learn that the Greeks did not have a theory of probability. Their belief "that the future unfolded according to the will of the gods" and their taste for "absolute truth" did not encourage the study of chance. Where pristine philosophy failed, the more grubby pastime of gambling succeeded in motivating probability theory. And, in true statistical style, it only took a handful of gamblers out of a large enough sample to get things going.
Today we might as well be Greeks for all that we understand or even recognize uncertainty. Even if we do not share the view that everything happens for a reason, it is still easy to ignore the role chance plays in our lives. We humans, with our big brains and clever language and propensity for story telling, are well equipped for this kind of failure. When it comes to recognizing randomness, we can be "outperformed by a rat". If this fact piques your curiosity or lowers your self-esteem, read on, and this superb book should satisfy one and restore the other. It is anything but a drunkard's walk through an intellectual maze. Mathematics, the social sciences, psychology, economics, brain studies, all contribute to the modern understanding of this fascinating area. By the end, several important ideas should have become straightened out into the intellectual equivalent of broad, tree-lined avenues, and you might agree with a quotation from Max Born: "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality."
First off, do not panic. Even a Harvard professor specializing in probability and statistics admits we're not cut out for this kind of thinking - which makes Mlodinow's achievement in writing an entertaining book from which you can actually learn something all the more remarkable. For example, I've come across the Monty Hall problem before, and thought I'd understood it, sort of, although it was like having to read a novel by following the words with my finger. This time, it was easier, partly to do with the way in which Mlodinow introduces the concept of the sample space and breaks down the problem into manageable pieces, and partly because his style is so engaging. It helps that he writes in the first person, and is neither afraid to draw on personal experience nor cringe making when he does so.
One major theme is the "fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness." Research by scientists like Kahneman and Tversky shows how deep-rooted this is. Most of us have been duped by optical illusions, but while these "seldom have much relevance in our everyday world" cognitive biases or systematic errors, on the other hand, "play an important role in human decision making." For example, confirmation bias occurs when we attempt to prove our ideas correct instead of searching for ways to prove them wrong, and "it presents a major impediment to our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness."
Abstract notions are never allowed to wander far before being pinned down by concrete illustrations, often taken from remarkably current affairs. There are two graphs - proper sciency pictures with numbers and axes and everything - which are striking in their portrayal of a startling truth: they show the performance of fund managers over two five-year periods, and while one is a nice orderly ranking from good to bad, the other looks "like random noise". You could have no better illustration of the small print that past performance is no guide to future returns - so why do we pay huge fees to these so-called experts to manage our money, when a large chunk of their "performance" is down to luck? It is salutary to learn that even Wall Street superstars cannot consistently beat the average market return. "People systematically fail to see the role of chance in the success of ventures": the CEO of Merrill Lynch could one year "be celebrated as the risk-taking genius responsible" for the company's success and then, "after the credit market collapsed, derided as the risk-taking cowboy responsible" for its failure. These are important lessons to learn, especially now that even red-blooded capitalists are beginning to question the stratospheric pay packets of financiers.
We need to move beyond "the deterministic view of the marketplace" in which "it is mainly the intrinsic qualities of the person or the product that governs success." The "nondeterministic view" - not confined to the stock market - holds that "there are many high-quality but unknown books, singers, actors, and what makes one or another come to stand out is largely a conspiracy of random and minor factors - that is, luck. In this view the traditional executives are just spinning their wheels." Such a wholesale change in our thinking seems too much to hope for, given how much "we rely on gut instinct" in everyday life and how tempting it is to see purpose where there is none, to "pay lip service to the concept of chance" but to "behave as though chance events are subject to control."
Uncertainty is a modern sin that dare not speak its name. There are always pundits on hand to explain the past and prophesy the future, to nurture some of society's "shared illusions". If you want to "learn to view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism" then the "Drunkard's Walk" is an excellent introduction.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Anecdotal Introduction to How Randomness Fools Us
Comment:
Have you ever flipped a coin 100 times to see the sequence of heads and tails that comes up? If you have, you know that there can be long streaks of heads and tails. Random results that end up 50-50 don't look that way in the short term.
Human perception is such that we like to find patterns where none exist. I remember the CEO of a company I worked for would draw a trend line through one data point with great authority, totally unaware of what he was doing.
More often, we judge by samples of behavior and time that are too short to be representative. Professor Mlodinow does a good job of showing how executives are often fired just before they get their best results, and how seldom the new executive does any better than the prior one.
In sports, we get all excited about streaks. Professor Mlodinow dampens that enthusiasm by pointing out that like streaks can occur randomly. We need to check to see if the streak exceeds the expected degree of variation before deciding that something significant has taken place. (But don't stop cheering on your favorite team and players.)
The book also provides lots of thumbnail sketches of the human side of those who have advanced the science and math behind our ability to measure and understand randomness. In fact, I don't recall a book on this subject with better anecdotes about the scientists and mathematicians. That's the reward in this book if you already know about randomness.
If you know nothing on the subject, this book is the gentlest possible introduction.
Enjoy!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Anecdotal Introduction to How Randomness Fools Us
Comment:
Have you ever flipped a coin 100 times to see the sequence of heads and tails that comes up? If you have, you know that there can be long streaks of heads and tails. Random results that end up 50-50 don't look that way in the short term.
Human perception is such that we like to find patterns where none exist. I remember the CEO of a company I worked for would draw a trend line through one data point with great authority, totally unaware of what he was doing.
More often, we judge by samples of behavior and time that are too short to be representative. Professor Mlodinow does a good job of showing how executives are often fired just before they get their best results, and how seldom the new executive does any better than the prior one.
In sports, we get all excited about streaks. Professor Mlodinow dampens that enthusiasm by pointing out that like streaks can occur randomly. We need to check to see if the streak exceeds the expected degree of variation before deciding that something significant has taken place. (But don't stop cheering on your favorite team and players.)
The book also provides lots of thumbnail sketches of the human side of those who have advanced the science and math behind our ability to measure and understand randomness. In fact, I don't recall a book on this subject with better anecdotes about the scientists and mathematicians. That's the reward in this book if you already know about randomness.
If you know nothing on the subject, this book is the gentlest possible introduction.
Enjoy!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb
Comment: Mlodinov is a superb communicator and makes easy and delightful sense of very many confusing but fundamentally important areas. There are important concepts here for anyone interested but this book should be on the syllabus for physicians, lawyers, politicians, business executives and many more. I have already bought 5 copies for friends and colleagues. Enough said !
Customer Rating:
Summary: Intriguing Read On A Random Topic
Comment: I've always been fascinated and intrigued by statistics and the laws of probability. If you too are into that sort of thing (or even if you're not), you will definitely find this book interesting and actually quite fun to read. The content really gets your mind thinking and actually expands ones views on life itself and how things work.
How To Keep Your Man: And Keep Him For Good
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Darren G. Burton
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