The Drunkard’s Walk

I finished “The Drunkard’s Walk – how randomness rules our lives”, by Leonard Mlodinow, a few days after Sway; I have postponed writing about it, because a minor storm of work has hit my parts – but I really loved this book, and thought I should say a few words about it.

The book’s point is that humans are very bad at drawing conclusions from observations of random phenomena. They routinely make gross mistakes when dealing with conditional probability (92% of Americans, some of them with pretty solid mathematical credentials, get the Monty Hall problem wrong), and fall prey to the Law of Small Numbers, seeing patterns where there is none, and refusing to admit the importance of randomness in shaping our fates. In the end, the message is pretty upbeat – I loved this quote from Thomas Watson:

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.

I really enjoyed how the book builds up following the history of probability and statistics; some of the individuals who contributed to its development are truly remarkable (just lookup Cardano for instance), and the book contains a fair share of anecdotes about them. If anything, it gave me my first introduction to Benford’s law, which I am still digesting – and which has been weirdly prominent in the news, via the Iran election issue.

In short, I strongly recommend this book if you are interested in either history of sciences, probability, or decision making.