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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
The Drunkard’s Walk summary
Leonard Mlodinow
How Randomness Rules Our Lives
15 mins
What is The Drunkard’s Walk about?
This book is about the role randomness plays in our lives. It explores the historical roots of modern statistics and delves into fundamental mathematical principles to explain how – like a drunk person struggling to walk – much of our lives is dictated by pure chance.
Table of Contents
The Drunkard’s Walk
summarized in 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
The likelihood that an event will occur depends on the number of ways it can occur.
Do you feel like winning a dice game has to do with your talent or your luck? Probably luck – after all, you know that dice is based on chance. However, if you’d won a dice game in the sixteenth century, people would’ve commended you on your excellent throwing or on having received God’s good fortune.
Why? Because back then people didn’t know about probability. It wasn’t until Galileo began introducing experiments and observations into scientific study that this changed. He soon realized that random acts, like throwing dice, could be analyzed.
Galileo explored the following question: Why is it that when someone throws three dice, the dice will more often have a total value of ten than nine?
And, after researching, he came up with a scientific explanation. Ten comes up more often than nine because there are more possible combinations that add up to it. He thus discovered an important mathematical principle: the chances of an event occurring depend on the number of ways it can occur.
Other scientists, such as Blaise Pascal, would later expand on Galileo’s insights. Pascal dealt with another dice situation and discovered something called the expectancy value. Imagine two people playing a dice game where the first person to win ten rounds takes home the winnings. But if the game has to stop early when player one has eight wins and player two has seven, how should the winnings be divided?
First, determine the possible scenarios left in the game (in this case, 16). Then, see how many of those scenarios would result in player one winning (11), and how many would result in player two winning (5). It then becomes simple – player one should get 11/16 of the winnings. That’s the expectancy value.
So, to determine the likelihood that any future event will happen, you have to know how many different possibilities lead to it. This is a fundamental idea in mathematics.
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Best quote from The Drunkard’s Walk
From a theoretical viewpoint, there are many reasons to question the significance of wine ratings.
—Leonard Mlodinow
Who should read The Drunkard’s Walk?
- Anyone interested in science
- Anyone interested in math or math history
- Anyone interested in how people become successful
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