If ‘The Drunkard’s Walk‘ has taken me longer to complete than usual, it’s because I savored and re-read many sections… that just made so much sense! Which may sound weird when I tell you this is a book about statistics. Yet that’s what makes it so special!
Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is a book about randomness and spans all kinds of areas like probability, confirmation bias, the law of small numbers and normal accident theory.
All of this is beautifully illustrated with examples drawn from real life to that anyone can relate to them effortlessly, even without any math or science knowledge at all.
“We can’t see a person’s potential, only his or her results. So we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person. The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random, but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions.”
The ‘two girl‘ problem fascinated me, and I’ll be telling many people about it, especially how the probability of a family having two girls changes based on one of them being named ‘Florida’!
“Keep marching forward. Since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of ‘at bats’, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success.”
I’ve highlighted large swathes of the book because they spoke to me deeply, reinforcing my inherent belief on non-determinism and individual destiny (see, that’s ‘confirmation bias‘ in action, right here!)
“We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success, and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation.”
But here are a few more indicative favorite snippets to give you an idea.
“The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books… It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived.”
I recommend reading ‘The Drunkard’s Walk‘, and gifting it to your science/math inclined younger friends and relations too.
It could alter permanently the way you (and they) see, think and imagine our world – and that’s always a helpful thing in today’s charged climate of everyone “knowing” they’re absolutely “right” about everything!
“We ought to identify and appreciate the good luck that we have and recognize the random events that contribute to our success.”
My biggest takeaway from ‘The Drunkard’s Walk‘:
“Our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.”
