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The Drunkard's Walk
- How Randomness Rules Our Lives
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
Critic reviews
"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)
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- Unabridged
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A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.
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Not about algorithms. Not an original book.
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Seeing What Others Don't
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- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
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- Unabridged
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Insights—like Darwin's understanding of the way evolution actually works, and Watson and Crick's breakthrough discoveries about the structure of DNA-can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us so that we can more effectively solve problems and get things done. Yet we know very little about when, why, or how insights are formed—or what blocks them. In Seeing What Others Don't, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery.
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Not enough actionable ideas
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By: Gary Klein
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Significant Figures
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In Significant Figures, acclaimed mathematician Ian Stewart introduces the visionaries of mathematics throughout history. Delving into the lives of twenty-five great mathematicians, Stewart examines the roles they played in creating, inventing, and discovering the mathematics we use today. Through these short biographies, we get acquainted with the history of mathematics.
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Beware
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By: Ian Stewart
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Blindspot
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I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Blindspot is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases.
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Difficult to interpret.
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By: Mahzarin R. Banaji, and others
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The Art of Strategy
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Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies - from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history - the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it.
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Completely misleading title
- By Motorjaw on 01-28-15
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How "Aha!" really happens....When do you get your best ideas? You probably answer "At night" or "In the shower" or "Stuck in traffic". You get a flash of insight. Things come together in your mind. You connect the dots. You say to yourself, "Aha! I see what to do." Brain science now reveals how these flashes of insight happen. It's a special form of intuition. We call it strategic intuition, because it gives you an idea for action - a strategy. This new book by William Duggan is the first full treatment of strategic intuition.
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Stratigic Intuition
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Bounce
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Few things in life are more satisfying than beating a rival. We love to win and hate to lose, whether it's on the playing field or at the ballot box, in the office or in the classroom. In this bold new look at human behavior, award-winning journalist and Olympian Matthew Syed explores the truth about our competitive nature: why we win, why we don't, and how we really play the game of life.
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Very eye opening
- By Joao on 06-14-10
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When Einstein Walked with Gödel
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Overall
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Performance
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Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.
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A good overview of scientific theory
- By MJ Walters on 09-11-18
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A Mind at Play
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Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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I wanted more information about Information Theory
- By Bonny on 05-08-18
By: Rob Goodman, and others
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Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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What listeners say about The Drunkard's Walk
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- John
- 09-19-08
Interesting
I found this an enjoyable listen. It was not too obtuse, although there were times I would have preferred to see some of the problems on the written page and I found myself rewinding the audio to listen to certain paragraphs several times.
Yes, it is about probability theory, the history thereof and some current applications, but there is more. The author attempts to humanize the effects of randomness, statistics, accidents of fate by using examples from life, like the OJ trial, Roger Maris' record, Bill Gate's success, etc.
Easy to listen to, not too heavy. You don't have to be a statistics or calculus expert to appreciate this book.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Ryan
- 11-23-13
Don't overlook the unpredictable
A better title for this book might be "How Humans Misunderstand Randomness". If you want to feel nervous about an upcoming performance review at work or day in court, Mlodinow can help you do so. Here, he shows how non-intuitive statistics and probability can be, and how people biased by their natural desire to attribute definite causes to events tend to discount the winds of chance. Consider how "brilliant" CEOs are often hired for enormous salaries, then fired a few years later when the company doesn't make the profits expected. But how much control does a typical CEO really have over all the factors that determine a company's near-term success? And consider how obvious the "clues" to Japan's WWII attack on Pearl Harbor looked in hindsight, but how they actually wouldn't have jumped out to analysts among all the other "noise" in the intelligence network. (These themes might be familiar to those who've read Nassim Taleb's book on unpredictability, The Black Swan.)
On the other hand, when we *do* think about randomness, we often have incorrect expectations about its properties. Gamblers don't always realize that it's not unlikely for a roulette wheel to favor a certain color over many spins, even when the roulette wheel is behaving correctly. Or, think about some of the mistakes the legal system has made. An example is the couple in 1960s Los Angeles who were convicted of an attack on the basis of witness testimony that reported two people with similar appearances and a similar car. The prosecution cited the one-in-a-million odds that the criminals could be anyone else. Yet, they made a few critical mistakes: the variables weren't independent and Los Angeles is a city of multiple millions: the real odds were closer to two-in-three. Yikes.
The Drunkard's Walk includes, along the way, a compelling history of the science of chance, covering figures such as Pascal, Bayes, Laplace, Brown (of Brownian Motion fame), and Einstein. Though I've studied probability and statistics before, as part of my college coursework, I find them to be fun subjects, and enjoyed the refresher (if not so much the reminders that our legal system is flawed). A bit of a nerdy book, but perfectly engaging.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Conrad Halling
- 01-04-09
Fascinating Book; Poor Performance
"The Drunkard's Walk" is a fascinating book about randomness and the role it plays in our lives. I have a good background in statistics, but Mlodinow tells many interesting stories that I hadn't heard before. I rate the book five stars for content.
Unfortunately, the reading performance is poor. The reader, Sean Pratt, gives a halting performance, with far too many pauses in the middle of sentences. It's as if Pratt is trying to think about the content while he's reading, but the content is too much for his brain. If Pratt had read complete sentences without pausing, the book might have been only six hours long instead of eight. It's this poor performance that makes me rate the book at two stars.
I recommend that you buy and read this book for yourself.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Greg
- 11-14-08
Nearly listened to the whole thing.
This book is to Freakanomics what Good Charlotte is to Greenday. It was the same principle without the good writing and interesting subject matter.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Shanthapriya Tellambura
- 11-20-12
Essential reading for almost everyone
interesting, relevant, fun. hope more people would read this. might need a little bit of scientific thinking to understand some areas.
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- Morten
- 09-03-12
Randomness explained!
What did you love best about The Drunkard's Walk?
Thorough and fun examples, prowoking and eye-opening.
What other book might you compare The Drunkard's Walk to and why?
"The black swan", only well written, and without the arrogance of Taleb.
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Performance
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- RK
- 09-22-11
Informative
Easy listen, enjoyable narration, salient information presented as such, not too bad for a saw buck!
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- Manvendra Kumar
- 06-30-16
Just Amazing, must read
All I can say is it is must read. Indeed you need to have some interest in Maths to go through the first half of the book.
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- Thomas
- 09-25-11
2X speed is a must!
I usually listen at 1.5x. I thought 2x speed would be too fast. This book is the one to ramp up the speed with. LOL. Sean Pratt is so droning. 2x speed is essential here! Not sure how Audible audition their narrators really.
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Overall
- Judd Bagley
- 06-01-10
Good, but fails to deliver on the subtitle
This was a well-written and presented work, but the promise of "how randomness rules out lives" was nearly an afterthought of the final, short chapter. That's what I was looking for, and to the extent that it went undelivered, I cannot rate the book higher than three stars.
None the less, I do need to give the author credit for doing as good a job as any in explaining the history of certain statistical movements. The narrative on the Bernoulli brothers was outstanding.
On technical mastery (the quality of the narration) I'd give the book a five. The narration was superb.
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