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

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives | Leonard Mlodinow | An extremely enjoyable read

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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

Excellent Anecdotal Introduction to How Randomness Fools Us

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!

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An extremely enjoyable read

It is always a pleasure to find an author who can write about complex issues and make the writing lucid and entertaining! Leonard does just this. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the forces which influence our lives...

Interesting, but with a flawed opening example

Mlodinow's work is solid and entertaining, but I was surprised at his introductory anecdote of when he was drawn to studying randomness.

I love baseball and revel in its stories. The tale of Roger Maris' star-crossed home run-filled season in 1961 has been written about so much that even someone too young to recall its details, like me, has now read enough to know the facts. Too bad that Mlodinow doesn't.

Aside from the odd suggestion that athletic feats are as random as flipping a coin, I could accept the interest Mlodinow had in studying whether the Maris accomplishment in 1961 -- breaking Babe Ruth's 34 year old home run record by hitting a 61st home run -- was as out of character as it seemed.

Mlodinow provides a basis -- Maris' rate of hitting home runs in his "prime" years -- and then explains logically how the rate during the record-setting year was not much out of character. He embellishes the point by explaining -- via randomness theory applied to baseball -- that it was reasonable to expect that someone -- Maris or someone else -- would have broken the Babe's record.

Made sense to me.

Until I researched those "prime" years and found that they could not be depicted by the numbers Mlodinow offered. In fact, they undermined his thesis.

Maris' 1961 season was exceptional, but so was his 1960 season and his 1962 season. In baseball terms, one might characterize his "prime" years as the peak of his career arc. Lots of good players exhibit the same characteristics -- they improve until they reach a peak and then gradually decline. Most of our lives mirror this arc, albeit over a much longer period than the prime of a baseball player.

Mlodinow should know that baseball and its fans live and die by easily found statistics. I simply went to baseball-reference.com, looked up the numbers for Maris, opened up an Excel spreadsheet and computed what Mlodinow said was a given.

I'm sorry to say this baseball example was shabbily researched.

The rest of the book is much more fascinating, but I wondered if it, too, was built on overstated and unverifiable numbers. All aspects of life are not as well-documented as baseball. That is our loss.

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Mildly disappointing

This is an appropriate a bathroom reader. Nothing is decribed in much depth.

Not recommended.

Great book, received from Amazon in poor condition when book was said to be "new"