The Drunkard's Walk : How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2008)

The structure of this book, the latest in a recent spate to tackle some combination of probability, randomness, statistics and behavioral economics, is your basic statistics course. Or at least the one I took in biz school. A nice refresher if you're already familiar with the concepts, probably interesting if you're not. The final chapter ends on a pretty thoughtful note about how we humans have to balance the need to feel we're in control of things and the knowledge that in many many ways, most of our daily lives are influenced by complex forces completely outside our control. ( )

Fantástica introducción a las matemáticas de la probabilidad y a los miles y miles de casos en nuestra vida en los que se pueden aplicar. Como por ejemplo la reversión a la media, que explica la famosa maldición del Sports Illustrated: cuando un jugador de fútbol americano salía en la portada de la revista, quedaba maldito y sus números empeaoraban a partir de entonces. Esto sucede porque sólo salían en la portada de la revista los jugadores con una racha excepcional de buenos resultados, por lo que lo habitual es que volvieran a un nivel algo más normal de resultados tras salir en la revista. Y así mil casos.
Este es uno de esos libros épicos que nos desvelan algo que siempre ha estado ahí pero que nunca habíamos decubierto. Muy, muy recomendable. ( )

Having read and enjoyed "Upright Thinkers," I expected to be equally impressed with Mlodinow's other work and this book met and exceeded my expectations.
The book was enjoyable to read because of the many anecdotal stories which were used to develop the author's thesis and main points, Another thing that made it so enjoyable to read were the many "tongue in cheek" remarks made by the author as well as the occasional personal story that illustrated the points.
I learned a great deal in reading this book and have used what I learned to influence my thinking when I hear or see someone using statistics or even starting a comment with the words, "Research shows....."
This is a great read for anyone and an especially important one for someone who wants to make informed political decisions based on facts and data rather than gut feelings of perceptions. ( )

I took up this book because I was intrigued by the premise of the book, and I have to say I was not disappointed. Didn't expect to face mathematics, especially probability (which I'm not too fond of ever since high school). The author deserves credit for explaining mathematical concepts in a coherent manner.
The book reads like a well-written novel. Although sometimes you need to pay considerable attention to understand some of the trickier parts. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

At the end of the book I was glad to have finished the book, and to have understood much of it (*pats self on the back*). From now on I'd be much more aware of the role of randomness in my daily life and to avoid some of the fallacies that arise from its ignorance. ( )

Assumes no prior knowledge, which is fine, but stays very shallow throughout, which was disappointing. (Perhaps the author or publisher took the 'each equation halves sales' dictum to heart, but the explanations could have gone a fair bit deeper even without any formalism.) I know this is a hard balancing act, but it is possible to start from the ground floor and build up to some satisfying explanations: Charles Petzold did it in Code, and Jordan Ellenberg did something similar in How Not to be Wrong -- his secret was to keep his ambitions modest, and genuinely explain some relatively simple concepts rather than give handwavy overviews of more advanced topics. The thing is, a lot of the concepts covered shallowly in this book are not particularly complicated, so I think Mlodinow could have done more to satisfy the curious reader without making things too daunting for the maths-averse.

(I'm leaving this unrated for a few reasons: despite having no technical expertise or qualifications, I'm probably too much of a nerd to fit into the target audience; several of the examples would have been interesting to me had I not read about them several times before, and it may be unfair to blame the author for this lack of novelty, given that the book was published in 2008 and probably predates many of the other pop science books and articles that made it seem like a tired rehash in 2018; and it was actually kind of a fun read, despite everything. There are some historical anecdotes that were new to me, and the style is easy going.)