The Drunkard’s Walk
How Randomness Rules Our Lives
Why chance is harder to reason about than it looks, from the gambler's fallacy to the false patterns we find in noise.
Mlodinow shows how badly intuition handles randomness: the gambler’s fallacy, the streaks we read into noise, the careers made and lost on results that were mostly luck. He works through the history of probability alongside the psychology, from Cardano and Pascal to Kahneman and Tversky, and the examples are drawn from courts, medicine, Hollywood and Wall Street.
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David Spiegelhalter
For example it looks at the gamblers fallacy, where if you are betting on something like roulette and red has come up more than four times in a row, the fallacy is that black must be due to come up. That isn’t true, as long as the wheel is fair. You get that in lotteries as well, where if numbers haven’t come up for a while people feel that they must be due – which isn’t the case as there is no memory in the system.
Interview · September 2011
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