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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6552 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-13
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

From Publishers Weekly
A drunkard's walk is a type of random statistical distribution with important applications in scientific studies ranging from biology to astronomy. Mlodinow, a visiting lecturer at Caltech and coauthor with Stephen Hawking of A Briefer History of Time, leads readers on a walk through the hills and valleys of randomness and how it directs our lives more than we realize. Mlodinow introduces important historical figures such as Bernoulli, Laplace and Pascal, emphasizing their ideas rather than their tumultuous private lives. Mlodinow defines such tricky concepts as regression to the mean and the law of large numbers, which should help readers as they navigate the daily deluge of election polls and new studies on how to live to 100. The author also carefully avoids veering off into the terra incognita of chaos theory aside from a brief mention of the famous butterfly effect, although he might have spent a little more time on the equally famous n-body problem that led to chaos theory. Books on randomness and statistics line library shelves, but Mlodinow will help readers sort out Mark Twain's damn lies from meaningful statistics and the choices we face every day. (May 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Christopher Shea

Leonard Mlodinow has had, to speak informally, a pretty random career: He earned a PhD in physics from Berkeley, wrote for "MacGyver" and "Star Trek" and has now settled down as a science popularizer.

A far more sober instance of randomness, however, underpins his new book, The Drunkard's Walk. And it's not hard to see it as a sort of Rosebud, explaining why the author finds unpredictability so compelling. During World War II in the Nazi death-camp Buchenwald, his father and other starving inmates had been told they'd be killed one-by-one until someone confessed to stealing some bread that had gone missing. Upon confessing, Mlodinow's guilty father was not executed, as expected, but promoted to serve as the chef's assistant. A different capricious decision then, and the author Leonard Mlodinow would not exist today.

It's been said that what divides liberals and conservatives is the degree to which each thinks luck plays a role in where one ends up in life. For Mlodinow, "There but for the grace of God" is a mathematical (if not theological) truth. In A Drunkard's Walk, which takes its title from scientific slang for a purely random succession of events, Mlodinow argues that it is quintessentially human to stamp the results of largely arbitrary processes as, in retrospect, inevitable.

Shifting from his own family's encounters with fate, for example, he notes that it is hard to imagine a world without Harry Potter, yet publishers rejected J.K. Rowling's manuscript nine times before someone finally said yes. There's a self-helpish lesson here: Whether we succeed in life is partly out of our hands -- think of the other worthy authors whose manuscripts languish in desk drawers -- but by persisting we offer lightning more chances to strike.

Sandwiched in this book between a morally freighted opening and conclusion is a primer on the science of probability. "Probability is the very guide of life," Cicero wrote. If so, most of us are mapless. We put our money in the hands of moneymen with the best records over the past (say) five years, ignoring research that demonstrates that these big-swinging stockpickers are as likely as their peers to wind up at the bottom of the pile over the next five-year period.

Even the scientifically literate can be confounded by probability. Mlodinow once tested positive for HIV, at which point his doctor sadly told him that there was a 99.9 percent chance he had a death sentence. But the doctor had failed to properly balance the 1-in-1,000 chance of a false positive against the 1 in 10,000 chance that a man in Mlodinow's demographic (heterosexual, married, white, non-IV-drug-user) had the virus. Within that group, only 1 in 11 people who test positive is truly infected; Mlodinow wasn't.

Once in a while, Mlodinow sends you scurrying for a statistics textbook when he ventures into deeper mathematical waters or skips steps in his explanations, but when things get slow, there's usually a diverting historical detour. This is the kind of book in which you learn that Pascal, after he set aside his work on statistics, took to wearing "an iron belt with points on the inside so that he was in constant discomfort," lest the siren song of happiness tempt him.

Nudge, in contrast, is a much more policy-oriented book. It comes with substantial advance publicity, thanks in part to the imprimatur of Sen. Barack Obama, who has embraced some of the authors' proposals, which are underpinned by libertarian paternalism. ("Paternalism" because the authors want to steer people to make better choices; "libertarian" because they feel people should still be free to make bad ones.)

Like Mlodinow, Richard Thaler, a pioneer of so-called behavioral economics, and Cass Sunstein, a noted law professor, discuss numerous studies that show just how far short humans fall from the ideal of homo economicus. Inertia, herd behavior, ignorance of odds, and egotism conspire to cause people to make bad decisions and poor predictions. (Typically, only 5 percent of Thaler's business school students say that they will end up in the bottom half of his class.)

Thaler and Sunstein's best-known proposal has to do with 401(k) plans. When people fail to sign up for such plans, they are leaving money on the table -- especially when employers match employees' contributions -- not to mention raising the odds they'll be subsisting on chunk light tuna in retirement. One study found that enrolling workers automatically in these plans -- switching from an "opt in" system to "opt out" -- drove participation in the plans from 65 percent to 98 percent.

In the arena of organ donation, switching to an opt-out system could save thousands of lives annually. One study in Iowa found that 97 percent of residents supported organ transplantation, yet only 43 percent of those people had checked the relevant box on their driver's license application. That gap could be closed if participation in organ-donor programs were the default position. If opt-in seems too aggressive when it comes to bodily organs, even a "forced choice" could improve the situation. Demanding that people give a clear yes or no would surely raise the number of donors, given the popularity of the concept.

Some nudges might be purely informational. How much of the current mortgage crisis would have been averted had prospective homeowners been presented with a clear, readable document laying out some of the bad-case scenarios when their low, teaser interest rates ended?

And there's more! What about a debit card explicitly reserved for charitable donations, which would make it a cinch to keep track of tax deductions and encourage more giving? Or software that detects uncivil language in your e-mail and asks if you really want to send it?

In the end, it must be said, the profusion of proposals in Nudge, however worthy, and the countless summaries of studies supporting them grow a bit wearisome. As influential as the book is likely to be, it's hard to imagine it pushing its way alongside Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (inferior social science, far breezier style) on the bestseller list. Then again, who dares judge the odds of the publishing biz? None of us knows when lightning will strike.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book on Randomness in Everyday Life
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.

Chances are good you'll like this one
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

Competent but unoriginal
Promising prologue "... when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed .... [this book] is about the principles that govern chance, the development of those ideas, and the way they play out in business, medicine, economics, sports, ..." but a disappointing book. The book consists of a range of topics already well covered in a dozen previous popular science style books: history of probability (Cardano, Pascal, Bernoulli, Laplace, de Moivre) and of demographic and economic data; statistical logic (Bayes rule and false positives/negatives; Galton and the regression fallacy, normal curve and measurement error, mistaking random variation as being caused); overstating predictability in business affairs (past success doesn't ensure future success) and perennials such as Monty Hall, the gambler's fallacy, and hot hands.

These topics are presented in a way that's easy to read -- historical stories, anecdotes and experiments, with almost no mathematics. So it's a perfectly acceptable read if you haven't seen any of this material before before, but it doesn't bring any novel content or viewpoint to the table. Other books are equally informative and well written but have more interesting individual focus and panache:
Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health shows hows to add analysis to anecdote,
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk has more intellectual discipline (staying focused on the current topic),
Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities gives a thorough treatment of implications of textbook theory,
The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari gives snippets of contemporary research,
Chances Are: Adventures in Probability has less hackneyed history,
and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is an engagingly opinionated view of chance in the stock market and life.