» The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Control Freaks Beware
Comment: I love books, all books, but I especially love science books. This book was more than a science book though. It was inspirational. If you read through all the way to the end, then you cannot help but be inspired. Unless of course, you are a control freak. If you are one of those types of people, then you may be a bit discouraged to learn that your controlling ways are all in vain. But, if you are a optimist or an optimist in the making, then this is the book for you.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Odds Are This is A Fine Book
Comment: A famous French mathematician of the eighteenth century, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, wrote several books on probability. In one, he analyzed what happens if you toss two coins. You can either get zero heads, or one, or two, he reasoned, so the chance of any of these three possibilities happening was one in three. He can easily be shown to be wrong, but he wasn't the first or last mathematician to be flummoxed by probability, so what hope do the rest of us have? The problem is even more daunting - probability, chance, chaos, or randomness has extraordinary power within many human endeavors, and none of us has intuitive capacity to calculate all odds correctly. In _The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives_ (Pantheon), Leonard Mlodinow reviews the history of how mathematicians came to an understanding of calculating probability, but he also shows how little any of us know about the actual odds. Wine ratings, CEO performance evaluations, movie studio grosses, home runs, and more are all under the encompassing sway of randomness, and while we are eager to attribute success (or failure) to the actions of humans in their endeavors, results are often not a good measurement for judging the competence of human effort.

It was really in the sixteenth century that probability got mathematized, and of course it was by a mathematician who liked to gamble. Gerolamo Cardano wrote the _Book on Games of Chance_ which showed how one could rationally analyze all the ways the dice could fall (people were using cube dice by then, not bones) and thus what numbers were more likely. Cardano would have shown d'Alembert where his error lay. Tossing two coins gives a "sample space" of head-head, head-tail, tail-head, and tail-tail, so there are four equally probable outcomes, not three. It's the same sort of calculation for figuring odds on girls and boys. There are subtleties, however, depending on how you define your sample space. If a woman has two children, and one is a girl, the odds that the other child is a girl are not fifty-fifty. The sample space you are dealing with is girl-girl, girl-boy, and boy-girl; by specifying one is a girl, you eliminate the possibility of boy-boy. Each of the remaining three possibilities have equal likelihoods, and only one has a girl as that second child, so the odds in this case are one out of three. There are not only puzzles here, but real-world examples like the O.J. Simpson trial. When lawyer Alan Dershowitz was faced with the prosecution's depiction of Simpson as a wife abuser, he countered with statistics that showed that in America, although millions of wives are battered every year, only 1 of 2,500 is murdered. Something swayed that jury, and perhaps this was part of it. What Dershowitz didn't give is the more relevant percentage odds: 90% of battered women who are murdered are killed by their abusers. There are fascinating ideas here about variations in normal populations and variations in measurement. Mlodinow shows that we often overestimate how much control people have. He draws many examples from sports, winetasting, or the business world, and demonstrates conclusively that success or failure depends heavily on pure chance, even though we like to give credit or blame to people who are only nominally in charge.

Mlodinow keeps things light. He is careful with how much mathematics he inflicts upon the reader. In discussing the famous Monty Hall problem, he advises that it requires no mathematical training, but "... it does require some careful logical thought, so if you are reading this while watching _Simpsons_ reruns, you might want to postpone one activity or the other. The good news is it goes on for only a few pages." In one lesson after another, he shows that pure random variation, our ability to see patterns when there is only chaos, and our eagerness to attribute outcomes to action rather than to chance cause us to think we have much more control than we really do. This might be a pessimistic message; as Mlodinow shows in many examples, circumstances beyond our control are what are really in control. This ought, however, to help us be gentler with ourselves and with our neighbors. It also shows, as he points out, that with chance playing such a large role, we have to seize every opportunity we can, and he quotes IBM pioneer Thomas Watson: "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: drunkards walk
Comment: The Drunkards walk is a great book that explains most things about statistics that most people never learned or ignore .It gets a little technical sometimes but overall has lots of insightful information .Decisions makers just need to pay more attention .

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not so random thoughts!
Comment: 'The Drunkard's Walk' includes a history of probability and statistics and relates the subject to modern-day life. In some respects, it is disappointing not to see any equations for combinations or probabilities, even in an appendix [...]. What is included is an excellent background in the logic behind setting up probabilities such as Bayes' theorem applied to medical statistics, when the likelihood of a disease is small.
Mlodinow's writing is entertaining and well suited for readers with a formal background in statistics and probability.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Best for Probability/Statistics Novices
Comment: If you're not versed in probability this is an excellent book to introduce you to the history and importance of probability in daily life. Its an easy and interesting read. Much of the book however is dedicated to explaining mathematical basics & history. If you already know what a normal distribution is, this book falls a little short in really linking randomness and how we perceive success. Only one or two chapters at the end are devoted to this.

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