The Drunkard's Walk

How Randomness Rules Our Lives

By: Leonard Mlodinow

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Informative

Easy listen, enjoyable narration, salient information presented as such, not too bad for a saw buck!

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.

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.

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.