Take a photo of a barcode or cover
greylightning 's review for:
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow
A really nice overview of fundamental concepts in probability and statistics, in the context of the lives of the frequently bizarre people who developed them! If you wanted to learn more about this topic, this book would give you a good handle on the concepts so you could dive in and understand your awful textbook full of opaque formulas.
I really enjoyed the descriptions of collaboration and inspiration among the people who made important contributions to probability.
The writing style is overall a bit academic, but still good for a general audience without any background in the subject or extensive practice deciphering universitese. It's pleasant, casual, and the examples are easy to follow.
Where this book falls down a little bit is in guiding you towards applying these concepts to your life or work. I think a reader would need a little more hand-holding and walking through specific scenarios to think about how to use these ideas. We're not likely to be guests on "Let's Make A Deal," so even after working out the awesome and counterintuitive Goat Odds, it would still be hard to go through the same process for scenarios we're likely to encounter in real life. This is where an author like Malcolm Gladwell would really succeed with this kind of material - by coming up with a few good ideas for applications and running with them, stripping them down to their bare essentials and presenting a persuasive argument for how to identify your biases that are based on limited evidence, override your intuition and rely on real measurements of what is likely to occur. Mlodinow tries to advocate for this, but you'd need to develop it on your own, and where's the pop-science fun in that?
I really enjoyed the descriptions of collaboration and inspiration among the people who made important contributions to probability.
The writing style is overall a bit academic, but still good for a general audience without any background in the subject or extensive practice deciphering universitese. It's pleasant, casual, and the examples are easy to follow.
Where this book falls down a little bit is in guiding you towards applying these concepts to your life or work. I think a reader would need a little more hand-holding and walking through specific scenarios to think about how to use these ideas. We're not likely to be guests on "Let's Make A Deal," so even after working out the awesome and counterintuitive Goat Odds, it would still be hard to go through the same process for scenarios we're likely to encounter in real life. This is where an author like Malcolm Gladwell would really succeed with this kind of material - by coming up with a few good ideas for applications and running with them, stripping them down to their bare essentials and presenting a persuasive argument for how to identify your biases that are based on limited evidence, override your intuition and rely on real measurements of what is likely to occur. Mlodinow tries to advocate for this, but you'd need to develop it on your own, and where's the pop-science fun in that?