Reviews - The Drunkard's Walk:How Randomness Rules Our Lives

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268 reviews for:

The Drunkard's Walk:How Randomness Rules Our Lives

One of my favorite books ever. If you are interested in human behavior, and why we sometimes behave irrationally even when we think we're making informed decisions, this book will enlighten you. And I use that word intentionally, because it really did change my perspective on risk. Usually a month doesn't go by that I don't mention or use something that I learned from that book, like the gambler's fallacy or the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy.

emmamtoner's review against another edition

5.0

sooo my tarot cards don’t know my future?!

gigawattember's review against another edition

5.0

This book helped me process my dad’s sudden death by car accident. This book was more comforting and enlightening than any religious text or emotional biography. Car accidents can be predicted. My dad happened to be in one. He wasn’t supposed to die, it wasn’t some divine choice, he was just the human behind the statistic. If it wasn’t my dad, it would’ve been someone else’s dad. Or Mom, or brother or grandparent. I don’t know why, but I’m able to cope with that. It makes sense. He wasn’t taken from me. It just was. There was no hate behind it. Nothing to be angry with. No one to blame. Just math. And you can’t be mad at math. That’s just silly.

Well, this book and the Harry Potter series. And some therapy. That’s my formula for healing.

yoursisterscanary's review against another edition

2.0

informative medium-paced

I chose this title because I enjoy popular nonfiction. It fits the bill for giving you probability and heuristics problems to puzzle over. It will not offer anything new if you have already read many other titles in the genre or have any game theory knowledge.

I did appreciate the narrative nonfiction that he uses to depict the lives of historical mathematicians. Unfortunately, he seemed to enjoy adding very sexist and dated references. At one point he used a direct quote from historical witness accounts that used a racial slur. It really served no purpose and was used to describe a person not that the person who used the term was racist or show racial bias at the time. Why not just use a more modern and respectful term? Seems like basic human decency to avoid slurs.

Later, he described one woman who lived during the Black Death as “promiscuous” and that she “hated children” because she took herbs to end a pregnancy resulting from a relationship outside of marriage. A bold judgement that seemed to tell us more about the author than the woman given the challenges of raising a family of four as a single woman during a pandemic in the Middle Ages.

Another historical account of a woman included a similar assessment of her “promiscuity” for “seducing her brother”. I can’t say this woman from the 1600’s did not happen to consent to such a relationship but since this is a book about probability, I think a quick glance at the rates of violence against women and girls might point us to a more likely interpretation.

Modern women are not safe from his critic either as he uses examples like predicting Oprah’s weight as a word problem. Even examples involving seating arrangements take on a sexist tone when he tells any would-be seating arrangement planners (women) to expect to be accused of being “histrionic” for asserting mathematic models were used to find the best arrangement.

Overall, I found the book very similar to other titles in the genre. If your preference is to have authors avoid casually insulting more than half the world’s population, you may want to pick one of those books instead.

mhs101's review against another edition

3.75

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

3.75 I loved the beginning, end, but not everything (the dense statistics) in between. Good food for thought though on your mindset and relationship with the randomness of events.