How I Learned to Love Randomness and Chance

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book does more in 200 pages than most books could do in a thousand. Interesting information? Check. Told in an engaging and entertaining way? Check. Useful for your life? Yes, most of all.

Some of the images here stay with you, especially the illusions of patterns that fool us. The sharp-shooter fallacy, where you draw a circle around a cluster of hits after the fact as if that was where you were aiming, like the clusters of hits during the blitz, or supposed cancer hot-spots--all generated by the same random process. Brownian motion. The graph (normal distribution) of fund manager success over time. There are so many places in everyday life where we see success or failure and tell ourselves stories about what it means without recognizing just how much random events intervene.

In some non-fiction books of this type, reviewing the history of the discipline is tedious, but not here. I love how this author explained the basics of the discipline a bit at a time, introducing new layers of complexity in his survey by telling the stories of mathematicians and others who first figured these things out. (Sometimes, the details of where they got it wrong helped explain as much as what they got right.) And the stories of Bill Gates and Bruce Willis and others are instructive, reminding us of what we sometimes know but can't always hold on to--chance events bring such people to the fore. It's not that they don't deserve success, but that many similar people might also have been equally successful if things turned out just a little bit differently, if they had met with luck at just the right point. The discussion of a study using chapters from award-winning books--sent back out as if they were unpublished authors, and still getting turned down--looks at success the other way, showing how random success can be, how easily it might have been failure except for luck.

This is not discouraging; it just puts things into perspective. I especially like the quote from IBM's Thomas Watson: "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." Good ideas and good products and good art don't always catch on. But they still might. Keep going.

This is probably worth reading more than once. In fact, this was my second time through, and more of the math penetrated my skull this time than the last time around. :) (None of it's hard math, but the non-intuitive probability stuff can mess with your head!) The information here can change how we make decisions. It really helps to see why firing that coach is probably a bad idea, why the margin of error in surveys needs to be understood better, why paying big bucks for someone to pick your stocks is probably costing you too much money, and why half the stuff you and I believe is probably based on faulty inferences we've long since rationalized into dogma.

Now if he can help me figure out which half...

Recommended. Good science, good writing. Good cover, too, actually.

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