|  | Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Vintage
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Rating:  119 reviews
Sales Rank: 2093
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307275175
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.2
EAN: 9780307275172
ASIN: 0307275175
Publication Date: May 5, 2009
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Showing reviews 11-15 of 119
 Illuminating September 13, 2009
Halvor K. Simonson (Edmonton, Alberta)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was actually lent this book, and it was so good I bought a copy to lend out to others. What are the chances that the best team won the World Series last year - a little better than 50/50, but not much. So many things we accept as hard fact are really just the result of a series of flukes.
Read it, and learn not to take life so seriously.
Muddled beginning, shines thereafter. September 10, 2009
Abhinav Agarwal (Bangalore, India)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Bit confusing and muddled beginning, but shines thereafter. Very readable, non-technical introduction to probability, randomness, and statistics, and more so of the people at the heart of the development of this science. However, does suffer somewhat as a result of this deliberate dumbing-down. Consider "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences", How to Lie with Statistics, or Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America as a companion. Read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness for a better understanding on why and how people make mistakes when attempting to make decisions under uncertainty and on Kahneman and Tversky's research in behavioral economics Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.
Books on subjects like probability, randomness, statistics, and such mathematical topics run the risk of becoming too number-focused, which while adding tremendous value to the book alienate 99% of the intended audience. On the other hand, deliberately dumbed-down books do little to inform the reader, much less educate him. This book falls somewhere in the middle, skewed more towards the dumbed-down end. What redeems the book however is the attempt to bring somewhat of a historical perspective, by way of tying each chapter to not only an important discovery and development in the science of probability, randomness, and statistics, but also weaving a very readable and well-written story of the people behind these developments.
I found the beginning a bit muddled because it was not clear whether the author was going to down the road taken by books like "Nudge", "Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions", "Sway", "Stumbling on Happiness" and others, or whether it was going to go down the mathematical road. It takes a chapter or two for that to become clear, and till then you have to persevere.
The author has a restrained sense of humour that does strike unexpectedly. Like "... your mother-in-law yells, "Look out for that moose!" and you swerve into a warning sign that says essentially the same thing." [page 147]
So, a relatively unknown historical personality like Cardano is introduced to get the reader started off on the journey in chapter 3, whose "... insight into how chance works came embodied in a principle we shall call the law of the sample space." (page 42), Pascal in Chapter 4, Bernoulli in Ch 5, Bayes and conditional probability in Ch 6, Laplace and Gauss in Ch 7, Galton in Ch 8, and so on.
There is of course a steady parade of terms you would encounter in statistics and probability, like "regression towards the mean" (page 8), "isomorphism", "frequency interpretation of randomness" (page 85), "standard deviation" (page 134), "error law" (page 136), "margin of error" (page 141), "central limit theorem" (page 143), "coefficient of correlation" (page 163), "chi-squared test" (page 164), "significance testing" (page 171), and so on. But there are no formulae in the book, so have hope.
Some excerpts from the book:
"... for the Hindus had taken the first large steps toward employing arithmetic as a powerful tool. It was in that milieu that positional notation in base ten developed, and became standard around AD 700. The Hindus also made great progress in the arithmetic of fraction - something crucial to the analysis of probabilities, since the chances of something occurring are always less than one. This Hindu knowledge was picked up by the Arabs and eventually brought to Europe." [page 49]
"Pascal's great innovation was his method of balancing those pros and cons, a concept that is today called mathematical expectation. ... Pascal's wager is often considered the founding of the mathematical discipline of game theory..." [pages 76, 77]
"In 1896, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce wrote .... (what) is called the frequency interpretation of randomness. The main alternative to it is called the subjective interpretation. Whereas in the frequency interpretation you judge a sample by the way it turned out, in the subjective interpretation you judge a sample by the way it is produced. .... For example, in a perfect world a throw of a die would be random by the first definition but not the second. .... In the imperfect world, however, a throw of a die is random according to the second definition but not the first." [page 84, 85]
The gambler's fallacy is the "mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently." [page 101]
"... the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data." [page 122]
"That smooth bell curve is more than just a visualization of the numbers in Pascal's triangle; it is a means of obtaining an accurate and easy-to-use estimate of the numbers that appear in the triangle's lower lines. This was DeMoivre's discovery.
Today the bell curve is usually called the normal distribution and sometimes the Gaussian distribution. ... The normal distribution is actually not a fixed curve but a family of curves, in which each depends on two parameters to set its specific position and shape. The first parameter determines where its peak is located, .... The second parameter determines the amount of spread in the curve. ... This measure is called the standard deviation." [page 138]
"(Galton) He dubbed the phenomenon - that in linked measurements, if one measured quantity is far from its mean, the other will be closer to its mean - regression toward the mean.
... Galton's other major contribution to statistics: defining a mathematical index describing the consistency of such relationships. He called it the coefficient of correlation." [pages 162, 163]
"... mathematician George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 10 (to the power 1000007) zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros. ... Spencer-Brown's point was that there is a difference between a process being random and the product of that process appearing to be random." [page 174, 175]
A thoughtful read September 7, 2009
Suzanne Corrin (Westlake Village, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
You don't think you need to read this book until you do, and then you will never read a statistic the same way again. When even the experts argue about statistical outcomes, here is a book to help you sort it out.
Although some chapters are not easy to follow if you're a lay person and not versed in mathematics, you don't have to understand all of the mathematical concepts in order to make sense of what the author is saying. Can statistics be used to manipulate the facts? Yes. But now you'll have a better chance of understanding how you're being manipulated and what you can do about it.
If you think this book sounds interesting, it *probably* will be August 16, 2009
Chris Edwards (San Deigo, CA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I liked this book. I have a degree in a field related to statistics, but since the method used to teach me statistics in college was not at all like the one in this book, I really have always felt pretty unprepared. If you want to try to get a better understanding about probability and why it's important, this book is a fine place to start. It also nicely covers much of how we got to where we are in our understanding of probability. This kind of humanized historical perspective is always helpful to me to put together a mental picture of why things are the way they are. To just have a bunch of formulas with weird new syntax thrown at you is a recipe for the material to not be deeply understood and to be soon forgotten. The Drunkard's Walk is the kind of book that should be what people new to statistics start with, not some dry textbook with it's emphasis on test problems (this book shows that those tests easily could overstate their results by being meaningless anyway). Another issue this book handles better than my first introduction to statistics and probability is the feeling I had that the professor was always just making stuff up (like all problems have some magical 95% confidence pulled out of nowhere). In The Drunkard's Walk, my concern that this whole exercise of statistics may just be for making ourselves feel better is not dismissed or ignored. The hard philosophical problems beyond mere computational fluency are addressed eloquently. I don't think the author has any profound answers and that's refreshing. I don't think anyone does.
Not so random thoughts August 11, 2009
The Concise Critic: (New England)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Listen: There are but two choices: heads--there is God; tails--there is randomness. And, before the coin flip, remember: this coin is not fair.
This book could overwhelm you with its arguments--that excellence is only appreciated by chance; that goodness is only rewarded by chance--but it doesn't. Instead of despair or inertia it imparts a folksy wisdom: a plea to think clearly about all the scatter; a plea to trash our prejudices. "We can work," Mlodinow writes in summation, "to immunize ourselves against our errors of intuition. We can learn to view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism. 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 perserverance. And we can place more importance on our direct impression of people than on their well-trumpeted past accomplishments."
Listen: That is a plea for sanity.
Showing reviews 11-15 of 119
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