
The Drunkard's Walk
How Randomness Rules Our Lives
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Narrated by:
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Sean Pratt
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By:
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Leonard Mlodinow
About this listen
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 CorpListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"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)
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Story
From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.
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Starts well then becomes non-Audible
- By Michael on 09-07-13
By: Charles Wheelan
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Superforecasting
- The Art and Science of Prediction
- By: Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.
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Great for Experts
- By Michael on 02-20-17
By: Philip Tetlock, and others
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Fooled by Randomness
- The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.
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Pass on this one and read The Black Swan
- By Wade T. Brooks on 06-25-12
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The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
- By: Eugenia Cheng
- Narrated by: Moira Quirk
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to listeners drowning in the illogic of contemporary life.
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Not one of the good ones
- By Emmett on 12-13-19
By: Eugenia Cheng
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Chaos
- Making a New Science
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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James Gleick explains the theories behind the fascinating new science called chaos. Alongside relativity and quantum mechanics, it is being hailed as the 20th century's third revolution.
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Best AudioBook on Math/Physics yet
- By Ryanman on 03-02-11
By: James Gleick
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13 Things That Don't Make Sense
- The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Science's best-kept secret is that there are experimental results and reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet 13 modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow's breakthroughs.
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10 interesting chapters-read epiloge first
- By Stephen on 06-10-09
By: Michael Brooks
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The Information
- A History, a Theory, a Flood
- By: James Gleick
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born.
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Brilliant book, heroic reader, better in print?
- By A reader on 03-12-11
By: James Gleick
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Math Without Numbers
- By: Milo Beckman
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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This is an audiobook about math, but it contains no numbers. Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math - topology, analysis, and algebra - which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. This audiobook upends the conventional approach to math, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and how these concepts all fit together. Join this freewheeling tour of the inimitable joys and unsolved mysteries of this curiously powerful subject.
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please leave your politics at home
- By david malaguti on 09-23-23
By: Milo Beckman
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When Einstein Walked with Gödel
- Excursions to the Edge of Thought
- By: Jim Holt
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.
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A good overview of scientific theory
- By MJ Walters on 09-11-18
By: Jim Holt
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Fortune's Formula
- The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
- By: William Poundstone
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory - the basis of computers and the Internet - to the problem of making as much money as possible as fast as possible.
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Could be MUCH shorter
- By Michael on 11-08-17
What listeners say about The Drunkard's Walk
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Overall
- John
- 09-19-08
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.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Ryan
- 11-23-13
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.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Conrad Halling
- 01-04-09
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.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Greg
- 11-14-08
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Shanthapriya Tellambura
- 11-20-12
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Morten
- 09-03-12
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.
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- RK
- 09-22-11
Informative
Easy listen, enjoyable narration, salient information presented as such, not too bad for a saw buck!
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- Manvendra Kumar
- 06-30-16
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.
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- Thomas
- 09-25-11
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.
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Overall
- Judd Bagley
- 06-01-10
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.
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