The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives | 
 enlarge | Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 94
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0375424040
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.2
EAN: 9780375424045
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: This item is new. Just like the one on the shelf at the bookstore only cheaper!
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
In this irreverent and illuminating book, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, change, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious cases, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.
The rise and fall of your favorite movie star of the most reviled CEO--in fact, of all our destinies--reflects as much as planning and innate abilities. Even the legendary Roger Maris, who beat Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, was in all likelihood not great but just lucky. And it might be shocking to realize that you are twice as likely to be killed in a car accident on your way to buying a lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery.
How could it have happened that a wine was given five out of five stars, the highest rating, in one journal and in another it was called the worst wine of the decade? Mlodinow vividly demonstrates how wine ratings, school grades, political polls, and many other things in daily life are less reliable than we believe. By showing us the true nature of change and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives fresh insight into what is really meaningful and how we can make decisions based on a deeper truth. From the classroom to the courtroom, from financial markets to supermarkets, from the doctor's office to the Oval Office, Mlodinow's insights will intrigue, awe, and inspire.
Offering readers not only a tour of randomness, chance, and probability but also a new way of looking at the world, this original, unexpected journey reminds us that much in our lives is about as predictable as the steps of a stumbling man fresh from a night at the bar.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Chances are good you'll like this one May 18, 2008
72 out of 79 found this review helpful
This smart book will make you think. Academic yet easy to read, it explores how random events shape the world and how human intuition fights that fact. I found this point fascinating. It never occurred to me that our brains naturally want to see patterns and order, and life doesn't necessarily work like that.
It's comforting to think of an orderly world, with everything in its place, running according to plan. It dovetails into our yearning for meaning and control, and the need to feel that we are important. The idea of randomness is frightening. If the world is shaped without conscious decision, it's a pretty chilly prospect.
Author Leonard Mlodinow examines the importance of randomness in diverse situations, including Las Vegas roulette tables, "Let's Make a Deal," the career of Bruce Willis, and the Warsaw ghetto after Hitler invaded Poland. The author does a good job explaining how chance and luck are vital factors in how things turn out.
The cover has a nice touch. On the dust jacket, several die-cut holes reveal letters on the hardback underneath. The letters are the R and D in "Drunkard's," the A in "Walk," the N in "Randomness," the O in "Our" and the M in Mlodinow. These letters are connected by a thin red line. They spell out "RANDOM."
Here's the chapter list:
1. Peering through the Eyepiece of Randomness
2. The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths
3. Finding Your Way Through a Space of Possibilities
4. Tracking the Pathways to Success
5. The Dueling Laws of Large and Small Numbers
6. False Positives and Positive Fallacies
7. Measurement and the Law of Errors
8. The Order in Chaos
9. Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion
10. The Drunkard's Walk
Fascinating, humbling (even potentially disturbing) June 2, 2008
34 out of 42 found this review helpful
The author says nothing new on the topic, nor does he say it in a way that is apt to make a dent in the "willful consciousness" of many who insist on a world of clear-cut cause and effect or on a Divine Will that keeps its eye not merely on a sparrow but on a nation's military actions or on human behaviors provoking retributions (hurricanes, etc.) upon its godless practitioners. In all such instances, the distinction between cause-effect thinking and predestined events that happen by necessity is lost. Instead, it all comes down to the pragmatic need of an inherently egocentric human nature to impose order where circumstances may not justify it.
The author writes to the layman, making the language of statistics, probability, randomness a fascinating read. It's clear that he's well aware of the fallacies and delusions (and consequent harm) to which most of us are easy prey. But he leaves it to the reader to draw any philosophical-theological inferences about the need for greater humility. His immediate goal is to help the reader understand the distinction between 1. the "common-sense" logic employed by self-serving finite beings coping with problems in the material world and 2. a "scientific method" that takes nothing for granted in a universe of perpetual flux. More miraculous than either the accomplishments of the romantic hero or the intercessions of a supreme being (everyday stuff for most of us) is the rare discovery that two things (or "events" in the spatial-temporal order) suspected of being connected (a hypothesis) in fact cannot be shown "not" to have such a relationship (the proof).
Such a small yield is unlikely to satisfy most of us, let alone a creationist or a supporter of intelligent design--in other words, it's not more propagandist "proof-texting" and weird science; it's "real" science. And those who take it upon themselves to help us understand the universe as it is, merit a reader's undivided attention. Highly recommended for the genuinely curious.
Excellent Book on Randomness in Everyday Life May 16, 2008
37 out of 40 found this review helpful
I just love books like this - especially when they're as well-written as this one. The author, a physicist, proceeds to show the reader how randomness plays a much greater role in everyday life than one might think. As he discusses the basics of probability and statistics, he provides wonderful illustrations from fields as wide-ranging as sports, medicine, psychology, the stock market, etc., etc. He does an excellent job in driving home the fact that the true probability of events is not intuitive. Perhaps because of this anti-intuitiveness, I had to read a few paragraphs more than once to allow the point being made to sink in. One enigma that is particularly well explained is the Monty Hall (Let's Make a Deal) problem. The writing style is clear, accessible, very friendly, quite authoritative, engaging and often very witty. This book can be enjoyed by absolutely everyone, but I suspect that math and science buffs will savor it the most. By the way, the math-phobic need not fear: the book does not contain a single mathematical formula.
BEST NON-FICTION BOOK THIS YEAR May 26, 2008
35 out of 37 found this review helpful
I do not know how to explain this book because it is so good. Its lessons are useful in business strategy, in evaluating the Iraq war, in deciding whether the Feds should lower interest rates and in planning one's own career. It is simply put the Best Book of the Year.
The author covers the growth and evolution of theories of probability, what he calls theories of randomness, and ties it together with anecdotes one cannot find in any other book on the subject. Yes, it is just as readable as Peter Bernstein's classic Against the Gods and far more thoughtful (and less arogant) than Fooled by Randomness by Nasim Taleb. The author is the co-author with Stephen Hawking of the Briefer History of Time and unless he has a ghost writer, is easily the best writer of non-fiction of the serious kind. His prose is perfect, his choice of anecdotes appropriate, his domain expertise unmatched.
The book ends unexpectedly but poignantly, about his aunt's awful fate at a Nazi death camp. Honestly, I respect the author's prerogative but I wish it was in an epilogue. It is too serious a subject and takes the mind to another dimension, to be read at the last minute, that too in a book with so much to think about anyway.
THIS SHOULD BE AN ADDITIONAL READING IN EVERY COURSE IN BUSINESS SCHOOL, SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, MILITARY INSTITUTION, BESIDES IN EVERY COLLEGE AND COLLEGE CAREER'S COUNSELING. AND IN EVERY HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM. AND IN PLACES OF WORSHIP TOO. NO PERSON CAN BE IN THE MODERN WORLD WITHOUT CONSIDERING THE ARGUMENTS IN THIS BOOK
The Odds Are This is A Fine Book June 27, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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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