Product Description

Leonard Mlodinow reveals the psychological illusions that prevent us understanding everything from stock-picking to wine-tasting, winning the lottery to road safety, and reveals the truth about the success of sporting heroes and film stars, and even how to make sense of a blood test. The Drunkard’s Walk is an exhilarating, eye-opening guide to understanding our random world – read it, so you won’t be left a victim of chance.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #824 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'A wonderfully readable guide' --Stephen Hawking

I do feel a little sheepish recommending two science books in a row - not to mention surprised at myself, for last week's recommendation, Quantum, contains passages of rather hard science, and I thought that I could do with a break as much as you.

But this book is different. It is in the nature of science books to contain science, and this is no exception; but it is unusual for them to contain humour and highly readable prose - not to mention very useful and practical insights which will help you live your life with a greater understanding of the world about you.

People, as Leonard Mlodinow reminds us, are not always that smart, and in fact our mental processes can lead us to the wrong conclusions. Try this one yourself: ask someone if there are more six-letter words in the English language whose fifth letter is N, or more six-letter words ending in "-ing"? You will discover that most people say there are more words ending in "ing" but just think about it for a bit.

That might not sound like a problem in probability, but it is related to it. And the reach of this book is extraordinary. Read it carefully and you may discover how to start a winning lottery syndicate (you need a mathematically ignorant lottery provider, like the Virginia State lottery in 1992), win with profitable consistency at roulette (and, if you're a casino owner, how to stop someone winning with profitable consistency), evaluate evidence in a criminal trial correctly, detect frauds and bullshitters, not give up when your manuscript has been rejected by 27 publishers, and assess the veracity of Bill Clinton's tax returns for the past 13 years. (I'll spare you the bother of that one: thanks to the careful application of Benford's Law, he's probably honest.) As Mlodinow quotes a Harvard professor: "Our brains are just not wired to do probability problems very well," but this is just the book to help us to do them better.

The charm of the book also resides in the quality of the writing. It is a good idea to use humour to help the mathematical medicine slip down, and Mlodinow does it as well as I've ever seen it done. There are bits that make you laugh out loud, but they never obscure the facts he is trying to convey. "If psychics really existed, you'd see them in places like [Monte Carlo], hooting and dancing and pushing wheelbarrows of cash down the street, and not on websites calling themselves 'Zelda Who Knows All and Sees All' and offering 24-hour free online love advice along with about 1.2 million other web psychics (according to Google)." He has, according to the inside cover of the book, written for MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which may have something to do with this.

Another remarkable thing about the book, which may also have something to do with his extra-scientific writing experience, is that he is not simply content to leave it at the maths, and scoff at the scientifically illiterate. He goes on to explain why it is that we often get things wrong - and why it may be advantageous for us to do so. One experiment seemed to prove that if you think you're in control of your environment, you'll live longer - even if you have, in reality, no such control. And this is what gambling is all about: our belief that we can see patterns in chaos. (Actually, the question whether there is in fact such a thing as chaos or true randomness is one tackled by Mlodinow.)

Even given this, the book still manages to surprise and delight until the very end. It is also - and this is something you really don't get in other science books, particularly the mathematically inclined - moving. Bracketed by stories about his parents' survival of the Holocaust, this is a work which goes beyond its brief to tell us how to live our lives in hope and knowledge. I do not exaggerate. When Beckett said that all he could hope to do was "fail better", he was more right than he knew. "Even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success," says Mlodinow. So don't give up.

--Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Review
'Delightful ... Our lives may be shaped by chance, but they are enriched by awareness - just the sort of awareness that this fascinating book will give you'

Review
'Mlodinow writes in a breezy style, interspersing probabilistic mind-benders with portraits of theorists ... The result is a readable crash course in randomness'

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Customer Reviews

Let us not be outperformed by a rat
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.

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!

How randomness effects our lives
If you wonder about the relevance of the statistics and 'proof' that inundate our lives then this book puts them in their place. With a nice bit of history about probability up to the present and how outcomes are not as predictable as we would like to think. It certainly added to my own feeling that with our politicalisation of 'statistical proof' in society that the wool maybe being pulled over our eyes. Everyone aught to know about probability and randomness. And this is a good place to start - an enjoyable read.