 | The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
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 2008-11-19 - A Drunkard's Review
This is interesting material which is of use by anyone who has to evaluate situations and make decisions. Especially in today's volatile world, the ability to at least identify all possible outcomes of an event or situation can be of great value. The book left me thinking I had a better grasp of probability and situation analysis than I did going in and most of this material was not new to me. Mlodinow does a good job of covering a lot of material in an understandable way without overly dumbing down the text.
 2008-11-17 - A great take home message ...
... you cannot change randomness but you can give yourself more shots on goal! It's eye-openeing that genius has a lot more to do with not giving up and trying again than common sense would predict.
2008-11-13 - If you like probabiliy, you will probabily like this book
The book starts with a captivating prologue:
"A few years ago a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his "accomplishment," he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights, he said, "and 7 times 7 is 48." Those of us with a better command of our multiplication tables might chuckle at the man's error, but we all create our own view of the world and then employ it to filter and process our perceptions, extracting meaning from the ocean of data that washes over us in daily life. And we often make errors that, though less obvious, are just as significant as his."
Now if that does not hook you, you might not be the probability person I am.
It talked about how people tend to be irrational and not consider the true probability of things happening.
A good understanding of probability can help with makeing proper decisions. A poor understanding of probability can lead to poor decisions. Its that simple.
I was also reminded of my statisics courses where I learned that small samples can be taken which that can be very accurate on the views on an overall population.
One example given was the probability of two people in a room having the same birthday. It is over 50% if there are only 23 people in the room. And it give the math to work it out.
It also talked about people's view of fate or destiny and how sometimes that can cloud people's view of randomness.
Good book.
2008-11-02 - Excellent history of randomness
This is a highly readable survey on randomness. It is filled with examples of how our intuitions about random events are wrong. My favorite is a description of an experiment. In it, the subjects are presented with a series of guesses about some random event--for example, wither a red or green light will appear. One method is to guess the color that appears most frequently. This is what rats do. If the green light is set to light up 80% of the time, the the rat "wins" 80% of the time. The problem with this method is it guarantees being wrong 20% of the time too. A second method is to guess "green" 80% of the time and "red" 20% of the time. This has the possibility of being right 100% of the time (if one can guess right), but over time will only average being right 68% of the time. Humans usually try to guess the pattern and, as a result, don't do as well as a rat.
 2008-11-01 - Highly probable you won't like the book
This book is one part introduction to probability and one part biography of mathematicians. If that interests you, then you'll probably like it. But I'll bet you find it a snoozer and you'll find it in no way lives up to the subtitle "how randomness rules our lives".
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