The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

This book had been on my list for a while. It's about how most of our interpretation of events is wrong: we read meaning into things that are statistically explainable. Like Freakonomics and The Monty Hall Problem, this book sought to dispel myths about randomness. I didn't find it as eye-opening as someone might who thinks about this stuff less often, but I did enjoy the anecdotes and experiments that Mlodinow references.

While this was not a "math book" it did give a lot of historical background around the science of probability and statistics. With references to Galileo, LaPlace, and Bayes (to name a few) it did a good job of showing how long we have been thinking about these things and how unintuitive they are. Like The Monty Hall Problem, this book illustrated over and over how basic probability ideas are not native to how our brains work - which in my case is both true and infuriating.

He spends a reasonable amount of time on ideas around conditional probability (the chance that B will happen given that A has happened); I find this discussion key to understanding statistics I see in newspapers and magazines. He also discusses the idea of independent events quite extensively - explaining that a string of 10 heads in a coin-flipping series is not a freak event and does not necessarily mean that the coin is 'rigged'. This is a hard idea to understand and he does a good job explaining it. I particularly enjoyed his sections on the difficulty in creating a good random number generator, and what was or wasn't wrong with Ipod's original 'shuffle" feature.

I also liked how Mdolinow used great everyday examples to illustrate his points - from how statistics were manipulated in the OJ Simpson trial to how wine tasting is less of a science than you would think, these sorts of stories delightfully fill much of his narrative.

Mdolinow has a lot to say about psychology as well, which was both a highlight and lowlight of the book. In places, his visits to the social sciences are interesting and well-placed. In other places his family's history, which he seeks to tell through the lens of randomness, comes across as clumsily located. I got the sense he had a bigger, more serious point to make around randomness causing pain and joy with no rhyme or reason ... but I would have liked to see him either make that point more strongly here, or take it all out and write a memoir about how randomness has impacted his life.

That said, I would recommend this book as a good introduction or refresher to understanding how randomness plays into our everyday lives.