| The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives |  | Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
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Seller: halcyonbooksuk
Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,742
Media: Paperback
Edition: First Thus
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0141026472
EAN: 9780141026473
Publication Date: April 2, 2009
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Reveals the psychological illusions that prevent us understanding things from stock-picking to wine-tasting, winning the lottery to road safety, as well as the truth about the success of sporting heroes and film stars, and how to make sense of a blood test. This guide helps to understanding our random world.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
 An excellent analysis of the history of Randomness July 30, 2010
Antonis Michailidis (Midlands, UK)
As an unlikely (but still possible) opening event to my contact with this book, I reveived it through the mail from Amazon without having ordered it and with no invoice. Having read it I was suitably impressed with it's historical accuracy, depth, and interesting viewpoint. Indeed, randomess is an aspect of scientific theory that experimentation's biggest challenge is dialing out. We have always been taught to try and avoid it as vehemently as possible in order to deepen the trust we bear on our randomness-free research results. Mlodinow's whole viewpoint is one of understanding randomness and tailoring our understanding to embrace it rather than avoid it, and as such it offers an enriched and amusing new perspective on the application of modern scientific method, and life in general.
As a beautiful side-effect of reading this book, you'll:
1) Stop trusting or believing bankers, hi-risk investors, market analysts or people who predict anything related to systems which aren't rigidly understood (financial markets, success of the film industry, fashion).
2) Realize there is so little correlation between which team is superior and which team wins the game that you'll practically lose interest in any kind of sporting contest which involves randomness-prone factors (namely people).
3) Learn to question the potential of false-positives whenever confronted by a member of the medical profession concerning any bad news you're given, particualrly when dealing with extreme cases of numerical disparity. This is not a criticsm towards doctors; more a statement that their understnding of statistics is lacking. (And understandably so, there's enough medicine for them to learn without teaching them statistics too)
An excellent book with almost no scientific background required. Easy to read through, very little bias in ideology or viewpoint, with plenty of highly informative examples from antiquity to the modern days. A must buy.
Alternatively, you can trust in wild chance to make one literally fall into your lap, like I did. Such is the nature of randomness!
Failed intuition June 21, 2010
Mr. Jonathan W. Taylor (Hampshire, UK)
This book is an excellent read - an easy read of the history of the field of probability and full of great stories of human failures to properly consider the odds. My only criticism is that whilst the book has numerous citations, some of these suffer from the same intuitive failings, or incomplete research as the author is attempting to demonstrate.
 The flaw is in the title March 28, 2010
James Baring (Milton Keynes, UK)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Certain as it is that randomness plays a vital role in our existence and can rule temporarily, and in the existence of individuals, it is equally certain that randomness cannot rule our lives in general. Indeed the reverse is so much the case that astrologists can help to sell newspapers and human individuals, the most autonomous life forms, have a hard time breaking free from causality. Think it through, the title of this book is an oxymoron. Rule is based on discipline.
Plurality, aggregation and basic geometry decide the patterns that randomness will form in any set of related dimensions. The dynamic progression inevitably explores the possibilities guided by probability in the limits of the relationships and effective boundaries. Absolutes we can leave aside, but the effective results of material creation are not random. Otherwise, no complaints.
A fantastic Non-fiction book March 16, 2010
Mr. T. A. Parnell (Cornwall, U.K)
This book is the perfect book for people wanting to understand how randomness and probability affects us in day to day life. It's highly educational and assists in understanding probability for the less mathematically able yet provides interesting facts and insights for those with a mathematical mind.
The book is excellent at showing how awful our minds are at understanding probability, and may help some readers with their daily decisions by analyzing their choices in a more mathematical manner instead of on gut instinct alone - decreasing the frequency of logical fallacies that are rife in the minds of today.
Mlodinow is a genius in his humor, a humor that is found on a higher level and requires a keen eye to understand yet with more simple humorous anecdotes and comments also included in the book.
Overall this book is an extremely good purchase, it's also taking me a while to read; despite being a keen reader this book is so interesting yet semi-complicated to understand it's taking me a long time to read - which isn't by any means a bad thing, on the contrary, it's only spacing out how long I enjoy it for!
Hard work, for me anyway... March 6, 2010
Jack Hobartson (The South of England)
I was expecting great things from this book, but in the end found it heavy going and didn't even quite get to the end.
I think the Malcolm Gladwell book series is better written and far more interesting.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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