The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives | Leonard Mlodinow

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives | Leonard Mlodinow | Staggeringly Fun

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The Drunkard's Wal...

	The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives Leonard Mlodinow Pantheon, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 60 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fascinating book that will change your perspective on life!

I originally checked this book out from the library, but it was so good that I had to buy it. It is an amazing look at chance, randomness, probability and how all those things factor into daily life.

This book explains probabilities and chance better than anything else I have ever read. While he explains mathematical concepts, he keeps the book grounded with practical and engaging anecdotes. For example, he explains the counterintuitive reality that though he tested postive for HIV in a test that had a 1 in 1000 rate of false positives, he actually had only a 9% chance of actually having HIV.

This book should be required reading for everyone--especially public policy makers, who routinely display a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of randomness in life.

You won't be disappointed with The Drunkard's Walk.

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Staggeringly Fun

First: this is not a textbook, so do not expect to become an expert by reading this. Second: some familiarity with probability & statistics, which I have, will be helpful. Without it, you will have to move slower - but that might make it more enjoyable.

While I wish some areas would have been expanded, the book as a whole is an enjoyable read. Mlodinow has a sense of humor and the ability to use entertaining examples of the topics.

For an enjoyable read by an intelligent and literate author, pick this one up.

Me layman. Say this book good.

This book reminded me quite a lot of The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, another popular science/math book that I enjoyed and got some insights out of. This one, though maybe not as well written as Surowiecki's book, offered me even more insight and interest; not only did I love reading it, I feel like it has given me an opportunity to change much about my outlook on life, and only in good ways.

A lot of the book is taken up with the history of the study of randomness and chance, starting with an Italian physician and scientist named Gerolamo Cardano, who made a fortune by learning how to gamble intelligently, in a time when people believed games of chance were controlled by the fates, or by God. Cardano paid attention to what rolls of the dice came up more often than others, and used the information to make better bets; he wrote a book about what he learned after it paid his way through medical school and carried him past a bitter feud with the other doctors of Milan -- who didn't like Cardano because he had written another book that pointed out that they were a bunch of quacks. The most interesting part of the history, to me, was the new knowledge that most of the great mathematicians of the past were, well, pretty messed up. I wonder if it has something to do with having a mathematical mind in a disorganized and messy world, especially in the European Middle Ages, a society so focused on determinism and fatalism that they believed that attempting to understand the world was basically blasphemy, as it implied that you could understand the mind of God. But whatever the reason, the list of mathematicians who contributed to the study of randomness include religious zealots, liars, thieves, and madmen; it was most entertaining to read about.

My favorite part of the book, though, was the conclusions that Mlodinow drew from this history, and from what we have learned about randomness in the last few centuries. The biggest ones for me were these: first, that random chance influences the outcomes of every chain of events, everywhere in the universe, and every second of our lives, and second, that we don't understand this truth. Because of this, we believe that we can control things that we can't, and we see patterns where there are none; I've never read a better explanation of hindsight's apparent clarity, and it's something I plan to spend quite a bit of time pondering. The other inspirational conclusion Mlodinow drew was the idea that failure, and success, are both influenced far more by random chance than we normally believe. He says that our failures do not represent a lack of ability, but show the inevitability of chance's influence on the world; we do not fail for a reason, not always. More importantly, we do not succeed for a reason, either, and so the key to success, and to overcoming failure, is truly just to keep trying, to never lose faith -- because if there's one thing we can have faith in, it is this: random chance will sometimes put us under the bar, and sometimes, it will put us over. We will win, we will succeed, as long as we keep putting ourselves out there. Knowing that the reason we fail is often no reason at all, but merely dumb luck, should help us to overcome the agony of defeat and keep trying until the dice fall our way.

I liked that message more than I can say, and I'm extremely glad I got to read it.

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Very good indeed

This book was both smart and funny, entertaining and quite educational. I was kind of hoping that more of the mathematic examples would be useful in everyday life, but the essence is easy: if you wanna succeed, double your failure rate. The coin is tossed, people. Buy this book.

Formulaic format for popular science book

I was drawn to Mlodinow's book by its subtitle, How Randomness Rules Our Lives, but was disappointed by the brief space given to how to cope in this world of randomness. The main issue is contained in the quote from Bruce Schechter, "Our brains are just not wired to do probability problems very well" (MY BRAIN IS OPEN: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos). Mlodinow can only suggest that we persist in the face of probabilistic adversity--by being steadfast, our goals may eventually align with the randomly changing course of nature.

Can we do better by understanding the world as stochastic? Consider the two-toss coin problem: given a coin faced with head (H) and tail (T), what is the probability that heads will occur on two successive tosses? The 18th century French mathematician, d'Alembert, answered that heads can occur 0, 1, or 2 times, or a 1/3 chance. The Italian gambler, Cardano, considered the solution space to be TT, TH, HT, and HH, or a 1/4 chance for two heads (HH). Both assertions are true as they stand, but Cardano's will help us more when we enter the casino. What makes Cardano's the better solution? Mlodinow does not tell us, reason and even mathematical proof are not always consistent guides to the solution.

The Monty Hall Problem (see Mlodinow) confuses many to this day, long after the correct solution has been published in the mathematical literature. Paul Erdos (and many other mathematicians) got the solution wrong, and was not convinced by a mathematical proof of the correct solution. He could accept the solution only after seeing the results of a simulation of the problem. Simulation may be our best general-purpose guide to probability problems, from the simple coin-toss problem to more difficult and useful problems like deciding the optimal mix of your stock portfolio.

Ray Kurzweil faces a similar problem with the exponential trends governing nature and technology development (The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology). Most of us mistakenly interpret these trends as linear and are astonished when the trend suddenly shoots skyward. Using his knowledge of the exponential, Kurzweil has engineered a unified device to scan text, read optical characters, translate to foreign language, and translate to voice, **correctly predicting when the required technology and marketing would converge in an affordable cell phone form factor**. A prediction assuming linear trends would likely have failed completely or resulted in a device the size of a washing machine. A stochastic simulator, driven by natural language input and engineered like Kurzweil's device, might help us start to make sense of the randomness around us.

Shifting to the realm of science fiction, Sergei Lukyanenko (The Nightwatch) writes about a secretive group of adepts, the "Others," who see the world more truly than the rest of humanity. They visualize spatio-temporal "probability fields" that they can tweak to adjust "reality lines," giving them partial control over their immediate destiny. They use this power mostly to avoid traffic collisions, to drive at breakneck speed through the streets of Moscow. Seemingly a trivial usage, but perhaps not to those who suffer daily in Moscow gridlock. Science fiction sometimes is prelude to science fact--some of humanity may already have bridged the disconnect with stochastic nature. You will never know.

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