The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Written 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Jun 11, 2008
• ISBN: 9781596592537

Reviews for The Drunkard's Walk

[Rob Frantz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Superb! Illuminating. Very well narrated. I highly recommend this audiobook.

[EliseNeumann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was really three books in one:
1) a history of the development of probability and statistics as scientific fields,
2) a primer on several topics of probability and statistics theory aimed at those who didn’t learn such topics in school,
3) a motivational pep talk urging us all to persevere and just keep on trying.

I did study statistics in school, so I can’t be sure how effective he was in his second goal. As for his first goal, I did learn some historical tidbits and some useful context for the development and progression of these theories, so I found this book useful on this first point. As for his third goal, I appreciated his prose generally, but it was distracting that he was so unrelenting in drawing the same conclusion from every instance of an occasion of randomness. I don’t disagree with his conclusion (that if every rejection is a flip of a coin, we should be empowered to stick at it until someone flips heads and we get our big break), but that he came to exactly that conclusion every time made me suspicious of how intentionally he cherry-picked his examples and anecdotes.

I would have given the book four stars, but the audio quality of this audiobook was surprisingly poor. The narrator frequently repeated a few words mid-sentence (as I do when reading aloud and realizing I used the wrong inflection in a sentence or am coming back to a sentence after getting distracted), and there were extremely long sections of dead air between chapters and sometimes in the middle of chapters. I think corporate must have forgotten to run this one past their sound editor.

[krishnanfromrgp · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved it; Learning : appreacite & recognise - randomness, chances, luck & the lack of inverse of these.