The Drunkard

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives Leonard Mlodinow




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Allan 25/10/2016

The Drunkard's Walk Sumary
"In a complex undertaking - as our lives, no matter how many times we fail, if we keep trying, there is often a good chance we will eventually succeed." - many major events would have turned out differently were it not for the random confluence of minor factors.
The book "The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives" is an interesting discussion about the role of chance in our lives. The author points out how hard it is to consider all the factors in nature to use deterministic insight to define our futures. Written by Leonard Mlodinow, a faculty at Caltech who teaches about randomness to future scientists. In his perspective success is much a result of random factors as the result of skill, preparedness, and hard work. Therefore, the connection we may see between actions and results is not as direct as we might believe - eventually it is more reliable to judge people by considering their abilities than by relaying on their past results, and events whose patterns appear to have a definite cause may actually be the product of chance. We can not accurately predict the results of coin tosses, but we can use probabilities to have a perspective of the changes of each side. However, people have a very poor conception of randomness - they do not recognize it when they see it and they cannot produce it when they try. We quite often misjudge the role of chance in our lives.
"Although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict - we all owe more to chance than many people realize, unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided". It is easy for us to understand and find an explanation to events that occurred, but we neglect to notice that this was only one outcome out of multiple possibilities. This is why we may judge that past events could be predicted beforehand. "In any complex string of events in which each event unfolds with some element or uncertainty, there is a fundamental asymmetry between past and future - event the aimless movement makes progress in some direction".
The author lays out that to deal with randomness, "we can focus on the ability to react to events rather than relying on the ability to predict them, on qualities like flexibility, confidence, courage, and perseverance. We can place more importance on our direct impressions of people than on their well-trumpeted past accomplishments. In this ways we can resist forming judgement in our automatic deterministic framework".
On this historical discussion about probability and statistics, Leonard describes about the influence and contributions of well regarded scientists: Gerolamo Cardano (considered the father of probabilistic studies, University of Pavia, Italy - 1576, who wrote the Book on Games of Chance), Galileo Galilei (University of Pisa, Italy - 1583, who developed systematic methods for analyzing the number of ways in which events can happen), Blaise Pascal (1651, who created the Pascal`s triangle that present the calculation of probabilities following a easy method developed by Jia Xian, 1050 and Zhu Shijie, 1303), Pierre de Fermat (1654, who worked at the criminal court in Toulouse, and considered the greatest amateur mathematician of all times), Gottfried Leibniz (1684), Jakob Bernoulli (1686), Isaac Newton (1687), Karl Pearson, Thomas Bayes (1701 - London, England), Richard Price (1765, who founded actuary science - Observations on Reversionary Payments - about pension payments), Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1764), Antooine-Laurent Lavoisier (1794, who was beheaded by a judge who said - "The republic has no need of scientists"), Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1790`s experienced electricity and magnetism), Abraham De Moivre (1733, who discovered the bell curve, and published the book The Doctrine of Chances), Carl Friedrich Gauss, John Graunt and William Petty (1650 - England, who are considered the founders of statistics), Laplace (1810), Joseph Fourier, Adolphe Quételet (1820, who found the normal distribution in the propensities of crime, marriage, and suicide - he also found meaning in a deviation from the normal distribution), Jules-Henri Poincaré, Francis Galton (1840, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Charles Darwin`s cousin - realized that process that did not exhibit regression toward the mean would eventually go out of control, and created the coefficient of correlation), James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, Albert Einstein (1905, who used statistics to prove the Brownian motion - it is only when pure luck occasionally leads to a lopsided preponderance of molecular hits from some particular direction that a noticeable jiggle occurs, since molecules are too light and collisions occur far more frequent than jiggle), R. A. Fisher (1920) Kahneman and Tversky (our days, showed that human behavior is not only unpredictable but often irrational).
Some interesting passages from the book:
"Our desire to control events is not without purpose, for a sense of personal control is integral to our self-concept and sense of self-esteem" - therefore, randomness goes against our instinct of control and self-esteem. Even the pointless power to control a simple order of test taking enhance motivation and reduce anxiety levels.
"Normal accident theory is a theory of why, inevitably, things sometimes go wrong, it could also be flipped around to explain why, inevitably, they sometimes go right. For in a complex undertaking, no matter how many times we fail, if we keep trying, there is often a good chance we will eventually succeed."
"Even random differences in pay lead to the backward inference of differences in skill and hence to the development of unequal influence - even when subjects know that payments were a random variable. It is an element of personl and office dynamics that cannot be ignored"
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