The Drunkard's Walk

How Randomness Rules Our Lives

By: Leonard Mlodinow

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

In this irreverent and illuminating audiobook, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, chance, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious causes, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

The rise and fall of your favorite movie star or the most reviled CEO - in fact, all our destinies - reflects chance as much as planning and innate abilities. Even Roger Maris, who beat Babe Ruth's single season home-run record, was in all likelihood not great but just lucky.

How could it have happened that a wine was given five out of five stars by one journal and called the worst wine of the decade by another? Wine ratings, school grades, political polls, and many other things in daily life are less reliable than we believe. By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives fresh insight into what is really meaningful and how we can make decisions based on a deeper truth. From the classroom to the courtroom, from financial markets to supermarkets, from the doctor's office to the Oval Office, Mlodinow's insights will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

Offering listeners not only a tour of randomness, chance and probability but also a new way of looking at the world, this original, unexpected journey reminds us that much in our lives is about as predictable as the steps of a stumbling man afresh from a night at a bar.

©2008 Leonard Mlodinow (P)2008 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

"A wonderful guide to how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives." (Stephen Hawking)
"If you're strong enough to have some of your favorite assumptions challenged, please listen to The Drunkard's Walk....a history, explanation, and exaltation of probability theory....The results are mind-bending." ( Fortune)

To increase your successes, increase your failures

This was a great book. It had just the right balance of anecdotes, mathematics, scientific studies and history to offer the reader a comprehensive and informative, yet thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the field of randomness. As the author rightly points out, again and again, people are blind when it comes to the role that chance or randomness plays in their lives, which is in fact very big. We tend construct our life narrative around situations where we made a decision that seemed to be crucial, which makes it seem as if we have been in the driving seat for much of our life. Still, most people can come up with seemingly random events that shaped the rest of their life. For example, I would never have met my wife had I not turned down a job one summer 10 years ago and I would not have ended up as a scientist had my grades been good enough to become a psychologist. If you would change just a few minor details in my history, and I might have lived a completely different life today.

Mlodinow begins the book by discussing some real life examples where people often fail to see the underlying mathematical truths. When a company does well, a CEO is rewarded with sometimes ridiculous bonuses, only to be fired the next year because the company suddenly did fare so well. This is the case despite the fact that fluctuations in the market are inescapable. The same is true in the world of sports where managers are frequently fired following dips in form which necessarily occurs if luck is a factor which it always is in sports.

After this introduction Mlodinow goes through the history of probability theory. I was surprised to learn that the Greek really didn’t get probability. They were excellent when it came to mathematical axioms and deducting knowledge, however, they apparently thought uncertainty had no place in maths and therefore ignored the field entirely. More than a thousand years passed before a man began to investigate the rules of probability in the mid 16th century. His name was Cardano and he was, of course, a gambler. With some very elementary knowledge regarding uncertainty, Cardano won lots of money which he used to finance his studies in Medicine.

Mlodinow continuous to move through history, while also making sure that the reader understands the theories that are being developed. Among others one encounters Galileo, Pascal, Bernoulli and Laplace who all worked on probability in different ways. One learns about the normal curve, chaos theory and bayesian statistics. Again, everything is written in an engaging yet simple fashion and I personally felt I learnt a lot even though I have studied statistics at University.

This book also deserves credit for being the first to explain the Monty Hall problem in a way that made me feel I really get it. Imagine you are a contestant on TV show, there are three doors and behind one of them is a car, while the other two doors have goats behind them. You pick one door (that you don’t open), then the TV host open one of the other two doors behind which there is a goat. At this point you have to choose to open the door you picked initially, or switch to the other door. What do you do? Even though more than 90% in polls, as well as thousands of mathematicians, passionately believed that it did not matter whether or not you switched, the correct answer is in fact that you will double your chance of winning if you switch to the other door. As Mlodinow explains you really have to guess which of the following two scenarios you are in:

The door you initially picked was the correct one (chance one third). If you switch you will find a goat.
You initially picked the wrong door (chance two thirds). Since the host will always open a door with a goat the correct one is the one the host did not open and which you did not pick. If you switch you will win.

In other words, if you picked the wrong door initially you will win if you switch and since it is more likely to pick the wrong door than the right door your chances are better if you switch.

In the last part of the book, Mlodinow return to the role that randomness plays in our life. After he has convincingly demonstrated how great this role is he arrives to the question of how one should act in the face of such uncertainty. Given that our successes or failures to a large extent are a result of random events, should we just stop trying? No! Mlodinow eventually arrives at the quote that is the title of my review. If you want to increase your success rate, you should increase your failure rate. Those who succeed in the end tend to be those who try again and again and again i.e. those who throw the dice over and over again will, eventually, end up with a six. Having read this book, I am determined to go out in the world and start failing. Thank you Mlodinow for the inspiration and for this excellent book!

Good book, but terrible AUDIO book

I would not suggest this audio book, and would instead suggest you buy the actual book. I'd give the book itself 5 stars, but since I retained less from this book than any other audio book I've ever listened to I have to take some stars off. It's like getting the audio version of a mathbook, it's just not the right way to read it.

It's a very good book; however makes for a pretty terrible audio book. Info is way, way too dense to get much out of the audio alone. (For example, I'm quite familiar with Pascals triangle, but when listening to audio I couldn't make any sense of what he was trying to get across when he was discussing it. I was left very confused, and cannot fathom how someone with less knowledge of it than I would would ever be able to grasp what the audiobook is saying. And I still rewound it several times.)

a bit of a plod

I should have guessed that listening to Maths is not the way to learn about it! Ideas such as Pascal's triangle are not easily grasped by a spoken description. There is a lot of repetition in this book, concerning the lives of various mathematicians, and how their theories have been read, re-read re worked, and reapplied. Very little of this book was new to me, and I think the title should have read "an introduction to probability theory, with historical references". The populist title used by the author, I don't feel to be a good description of the contents.

Fortunately, I got this book at cut price. I'm glad I didn't pay the original price for it.

A Welcome Primer on Statistics for Daily Life

Easy to digest, and very useful in everyday life and business. Helps to remind you not to be fooled by randomness, even if you're reading a 'statistically significant' result (i.e., a study or poll can give you a statistically significant outcome, but that outcome can be the result of randomness). Useful in reading polling results, scientific studies in the news, sports, etc. And guess what? It is as easy to consume as any of Gladwell's books; it's not dry and boring.

Interesting but....

its was a bit technical, lots of math which was rather hard to follow while listening. I would therefore suggest reading this one instead of listening to it.

Excellent book! Enjoyed every minute!

I found this book absolutely fascinating. It's the kind of book that makes you think about things differently, and I found that when I wasn't listening to it, I spent a lot of time thinking through the things I had heard last time I listened. The book is great, the narrator is great, if you're a fan of science, and of learning new, mind-expanding things you hadn't thought about before, read this!

Not what title suggests...

Not really sure what it is though. More about probablility theory development. There are some really interesting parts that I found fasinating... but on the whole it was too easy for my brain to space it out and I had to rewind a lot to figure out where I was before my brain turned off. It would be of great interest to mathmatically inclined people, theorists or perhaps gamblers.

Too detailed to be an enjoyable audio read

Basically about how poorly we all understand the true probabilities of the events in the world around us. Mlodinow gives a lot of specific examples and explanations to show how what we perceive to be the possibility that something will happen is often very far off from its true probability. Interesting concept to start with, but it quickly began sounding way too much like my high school prob and stat class. This made my eyes glaze over, and I found myself wishing some sort of bell would ring so I could quit thinking about it. Ultimately, it made my brain hurt, so I quit after a little over three hours. I didn't realize how specific this book was going to get, and I kept wishing I could flip back a page and reread. I find this annoying to do repeatedly in an audiobook; I think this book is one that is better read in the flesh, especially if you are at all a visual learner. I've been on a reading binge lately, and this is only the second book I've quit reading out of about 20 (print and audio) in the past two months. It was just too detail-oriented for me to enjoy as an audiobook.

Great book, probably better to read than listen to

really enjoyed this one even though alot of the times it felt as if it was better to read the book than listen to it, but nonetheless very insightful and a must read.

Another mind opener

This book does take some time to get in to. You may be tempted to stop listening after the first 20 mins or so, but trust me, hang on, since it gets better and better.

I was delighted with the book. I feel like I have learnt a lot, even about some concepts that I have already encountered before. And it was an enjoyable learning experience!

If you are taking a course in statistics, this book is a must for you, since it will shed some light and interest onto the course material and will help you get a clearer and fuller picture.

It can also leave you with a lot of hope- a lot of the the phenomenons in this world are random- thus almost anything is possible...