The Drunkard's Walk -- Take 2

It's true, I finally finished it!

I learned a lot about dead mathematicians (most of them European), who occupy the first 80 pages or so. They include Cicero, Galileo, Gerolamo Cardano, Blaise Pascal, Jakob, Johann, and Daniel Bernoulli, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. With a little Greek philosophy courtesy of Zeno thrown in for good measure. The history was fascinating, a bit in the style of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Once that portion of the book ends, though, things get confusing.

The subtitle tells us that "randomness rules our lives." However, what follows the history lesson is a hundred-page explanation of why things which we think are random are, in fact, not. A good chunk of the second half of the book is devoted to the history of statistics, and a good portion of that is devoted to the discovery and application of the normal distribution and standard deviation (aka the Bell Curve).

It was tough getting through the middle pages of the book, for two reasons. First, the concepts are complicated. Mlodinow does a good job of simplifying them, but I have a terrible memory for everything, and especially for complicated ideas. Someone who does not share this charming flaw of mine would probably have better luck wading through this stuff. Second, I was asking myself, "Isn't this supposed to be a book about randomness? Why are we talking about how everything conforms to this standard deviation? Shouldn't the purpose be to show that the data points are all over the chart?" Confusion ensued.

Finally, though, getting on towards page 200, we get back to the idea of randomness. Discussing Einstein's discovery of the microscopic movements of molecules: "much of the order we perceive in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness." Now maybe we're on to something. The randomness which rules our lives is microscopic? Really? I doubt it, therefore I am still confused. So I continue reading....

As a nice bookend to counter the history early on, Mlodinow zooms out at the end of the book to take a macroscopic view of this alleged randomness. As examples, he looks at fund managers' ability to improve portfolios and movie producers' ability to pick box office smashes. "But in all aspects of our lives we encounter streaks and other peculiar patterns of success and failure. Sometimes success predominates, sometimes failure. Either way it is important in our own lives to take the long view and understand that streaks and other patterns that don't appear random can indeed happen by pure chance. It is also important, when assessing others, to recognize that among a large group of people it would be very odd if one of them didn't experience a long streak of successes or failures.... In the scientific study of random processes the drunkard's walk is the archetype. In our lives it also provides an apt model, for like the granules of pollen floating in the Brownian fluid, we're continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize."

Ah-ha! Now we have it!

I guess I can see, if I look hard, how all of his complicated math-y/science-y background leads up to that conclusion, but it seemed a bit excessive to me. Or maybe I just don't understand it well enough to know how it all ties in. But at least the book ends on a high note:
"What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success."

Some other random interesting thoughts that don't really contribute to my discussion, but are cool:

- Quoting Francis Bacon regarding the confirmation bias: "The human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken."

- On how little things can change our lives: "In complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents." These are the things which we notice only in retrospect. Seems like a simple point, but it's so true!

- Discussing the goal of creating vodkas as neutral, flavorless liquors: "Lest I be dismissed as a tasteless boor, I wish to point out that there is a way to test my ravings. You could line up a series of vodkas and a series of vodka sophisticates and perform a blind tasting. As it happens, The New York Times did just that. And without their labels, fancy vodkas like Grey Goose and Ketel One didn't fare so well. Compared with conventional wisdom, in fact, the results appeared random. Moreover, of the twenty-one vodkas tasted, it was the cheap bar brand, Smirnoff, that came out at the top of the list. Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data."

As an aside, I was reading the hardcover version of this book. There were probably two dozen places where the publisher (Pantheon) left off words at the ends of lines. There's just an blank space where the word belongs. That was annoying. But thankfully mom had filled most of them in when she read it before me. And hopefully Pantheon fixed that problem when they printed the paperback version! Also, sometimes it was oddly punctuated. Just a comment.