Drunkard's Walk

I finished reading a great book a few months ago by the theoretical physicist, Leonard Mlodinow entitled The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.  I highly recommend it!  Mlodinow talks about the role of randomness in our everyday lives and the cognitive biases that lead us to misinterpret them.  The laws of probability may seem simple on their surface (and I say that while fully admitting that some of these so-called "simple laws" are beyond my understanding), but in a world that is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and turbulence (VUCAT), it's often difficult and at times impossible to distinguish between random and non-random events.  He writes, "If events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events."

Mlodinow is one of the few theoretical physicists that I have encountered (I've been reading a lot of books on chaos and complexity lately - trust me) who can explain specialized topics in ways that even non-physicists can understand.  He writes about concepts such as "regression toward the mean" and "the law of large numbers" and discusses how such things as wine ratings and political polls are surprisingly random.  He spends most of one chapter on the famous "Monty Hall problem" and how it applies to our everyday lives.  He even writes a little on complex systems and chaos - "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" (sounds a lot like the "butterfly effect" right?).  

Mlodinow writes, "The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors."  The truth is, we live in a random, non-linear world.  He ends the book with what I thought was a very powerful point, "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.  Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."