Review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
a bit dry, to me. interesting last chapter on the very loose relationship between quality and success
English language
Published June 19, 2008
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
4 stars
(28 reviews)
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is a 2008 popular science book by American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, which became a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times notable book.
Review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I found this book to be quite interesting, but I found its writing tiresome and scattered. I would have given it 3 stars for writing and 4 stars for the wealth of information it presents.
The author chooses some very nice topics to discuss, but there seems to be little cohesion in how they are ordered and presented. For some topics he has an extensive historical introduction, and for a while you think that history might be the unifying approach in the book, but others are presented via personal anecdotes instead.
The best part of the book might be the way you finish reading it and are convinced of how random process are at work in so many parts of your life. Another good one is that you learn that there exist techniques for understanding estimation of the probability of things.
Maybe the most tiresome part of the book is …
I found this book to be quite interesting, but I found its writing tiresome and scattered. I would have given it 3 stars for writing and 4 stars for the wealth of information it presents.
The author chooses some very nice topics to discuss, but there seems to be little cohesion in how they are ordered and presented. For some topics he has an extensive historical introduction, and for a while you think that history might be the unifying approach in the book, but others are presented via personal anecdotes instead.
The best part of the book might be the way you finish reading it and are convinced of how random process are at work in so many parts of your life. Another good one is that you learn that there exist techniques for understanding estimation of the probability of things.
Maybe the most tiresome part of the book is the attempt at doing inline math in the text. You never know if the next paragraph will be narrative text or a verbose description of how to count something.
Better typesetting and visualization would have helped a lot. Nate Silver's book [b:The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't|13588394|The Signal and the Noise Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't|Nate Silver|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355058876s/13588394.jpg|19175796] had some presentation problems (see my review), but it was not lazy about good tabular material and putting the technical details into a separate flow from the narrative text.
Review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is a book about statistics and probability. While the author tries very hard to keep it light and accessible, inevitably there's a fair amount of arithmetic thrown around in each chapter.
I mention this because you're likely to find your head spinning a few times as you try to get your brain wrapped around the points being made. It doesn't help of course that we are wired (as Mlodinow repeatedly illustrates)in such a way that we reject randomness in favor of structure, even if that structure is entirely fictitious.
Along the way Mlodinow happily demolishes the "superstar" CEO, expert Wall Street stock pickers and the notion that Hollywood executives actually have the ability to pick blockbuster movies. All of these, it turns out, owe far more to randomness than anything else.
And yet, while knowing all that, and being able to replicate at least some of the math, it's …
This is a book about statistics and probability. While the author tries very hard to keep it light and accessible, inevitably there's a fair amount of arithmetic thrown around in each chapter.
I mention this because you're likely to find your head spinning a few times as you try to get your brain wrapped around the points being made. It doesn't help of course that we are wired (as Mlodinow repeatedly illustrates)in such a way that we reject randomness in favor of structure, even if that structure is entirely fictitious.
Along the way Mlodinow happily demolishes the "superstar" CEO, expert Wall Street stock pickers and the notion that Hollywood executives actually have the ability to pick blockbuster movies. All of these, it turns out, owe far more to randomness than anything else.
And yet, while knowing all that, and being able to replicate at least some of the math, it's still hard to shake the feeling that my gut instinct is better than the numbers. Humans are funny creatures.
Our decisions are rarely based on facts and almost entirely on observation and guess work. Mlodinow in one aside notes that there was a noticeable increase in deaths as a result of car accidents after 9/11 as people stopped using planes. They would of course have been far safer in the air. But that's not what their instincts told them.
I'd say this book was required reading, because I guarantee you are guilty of at least some of the behavior that Mlodinow describes in the book. And it's probably not doing you any favors. If nothing else you may be able to improve the performance of your 401K...
Review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
One of my favorite books ever. If you are interested in human behavior, and why we sometimes behave irrationally even when we think we're making informed decisions, this book will enlighten you. And I use that word intentionally, because it really did change my perspective on risk. Usually a month doesn't go by that I don't mention or use something that I learned from that book, like the gambler's fallacy or the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy.
Review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
