The Drunkard's Walk Leonard Mlodinow Summary

Introduction
Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist and author, recognized for groundbreaking discoveries in physics, and as the author of five best-selling books to include, The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, and his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives which was short-listed for the Royal Society book award. The title The Drunkard’s Walk comes from the mathematical term describing random motion, such as paths, molecules follow as they fly through space, incessantly bumping, and being bumped by, their sister molecules. The author’s goal for this book was to illustrate the role of chance in the world around us and to show how we may recognize
The key risks of mind-sets are that: analysts perceive what they expect to perceive; once formed, they are resistant to change; new information is assimilated, sometimes erroneously, into existing mental models; and conflicting information is often dismissed or ignored. The Drunkard’s Walk is an ideal source in understanding various biases and mindsets. Richards Heuer’s book Psychology of Intelligence Analysis described cognitive biases as mental errors caused by our simplified information processing strategies that do not result from any emotional or intellectual predisposition toward a certain judgment, but rather from subconscious mental procedures for processing information; also, cognitive bias is a mental error that is consistent and predictable . Mlodinow describes how cognitive biases play an important role in human decision-making and sourced researchers’ conclusions that people have a very poor conception of randomness, which resulted in routine misjudgment of chance in their lives and caused them to make decisions that were misaligned with their own best interests. He was able to provide a variety of evidence that demonstrated that the greater the sequence of events, than the greater the probability that one will find a pattern. Mlodinow further elaborated how it is human nature to look for these
1) The author did clearly identify his key judgement or goal, which is to illustrate the role of chance in the world around us and to show how we may recognize it at work in human affairs. Mlodinow’s argument structure is mixed. 2) His evidence was relevant and included a wide variety to ensure understanding of those who may not have a mathematical mindset, which ranged from sports to financial stocks. 3) His supporting evidence also seemed to be true and convincing. The author provided a wide range of evidence from the historical perspective to today’s concerns. 4) Mlodinow’s inferences were inference of principle and general to connect his evidence to the claims and they were effective. 5) His book provided a wide spectrum of evidence that prevents the book from being extremely vulnerable to new evidence. 6) Overall, Mlodinov’s book was connected and flowed through the various chapters with