What I Learned from The Drunkard Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

You've probably never heard of Leonard Mlodinow. Neither have I; until a few months ago when I was being recommended one of his books, a NYT best seller titled:

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives

My interest in human rationality, critical thinking and statistics made me prioritize it in my reading list. A quick background search of the author revealed that he's a physicist with doctorate on quantum perturbation theory from UC Berkeley.

Leonard Mlodinow didn't pursue a career in academia; he turned to writing instead. He wrote 5 best sellers, two of them co-authored with none other than Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time). He also co-authored a book with Deepak Chopra (War of The Worldviews), but I'll save my comments on this for later; keep reading.

Here I am going to share a few of my most important highlights from The Drunkard's Walk.

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The Drunkard's Walk - My Key Points

1. Our inner ability to detect patterns was important in getting us to today. But such ability is often redundant; at times, we see patterns even where they are none:

• "Nestled among those haphazardly scattered stars are on a clear, moonless night, the patterns. A lion here, a dipper there. The ability to detect patterns can be both a strength and a weakness. Isaac Newton pondered the patterns of falling objects and created a law of universal gravitation. Others have noted a spike in their athletic performance when they are wearing dirty socks and thenceforth have refused to wear clean ones. Among all the patterns of nature, how do we distinguish the meaningful ones?"[1]

2. The essence of the book and the idea behind the title was inspired by Einstein's work on the random motion of molecules in a fluid:

• "According to the atomic picture, the fundamental motion of water molecules is chaotic. The molecules fly first this way, then that, moving in a straight line only until deflected by an encounter with one of their sisters. As mentioned in the Prologue, this type of path—in which at various points the direction changes randomly—is often called a drunkard’s walk, for reasons obvious to anyone who has ever enjoyed a few too many martinis (more sober mathematicians and scientists sometimes call it a random walk). If particles that float in a liquid are, as atomic theory predicts, constantly and randomly bombarded by the molecules of the liquid, one might expect them to jiggle this way and that owing to the collisions." [1]

Mlodinow explains the two problems with Brownian motion and how Einstein was able to figure how they cancel each other out.

3. He also discusses the availability bias, or how we give unwarranted importance to our most vivid memories when we reconstruct the past.

• "The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment." [1]

I wrote about this in Things Make Sense in Retrospect.

4. Along with relying heavy on our most vivid memories, we also tend to 'fill-in-the-gaps' when there's incomplete information about something; we use imagination for that:

• "As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that our “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?" [1]

To prevent such from happening, we need to improve our ability to identify false patterns. We need to use statistics and math to get an unromantic view of reality; but most of us don't do that.

5. When we're too invested into our own arguments, we fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy:

• "For example, in 2006 The New England Journal of Medicine published a $12.5 million study of patients with documented osteoarthritis of the knee. The study showed that a combination of the nutritional supplements glucosamine and chondroitin is no more effective in relieving arthritis pain than a placebo. Still, one eminent doctor had a hard time letting go of his feeling that the supplements were effective and ended his analysis of the study on a national radio program by reaffirming the possible benefit of the treatment, remarking that, “One of my wife’s doctors has a cat and she says that this cat cannot get up in the morning without a little dose of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate.”" [1]

Ha! In your face, scientific reasoning!

6. As per Leonard Mlodinow:

• "It is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios for the future. That there are traps in such endeavors doesn’t mean we should not undertake them. But we can work to immunize ourselves against our errors of intuition. We can learn to view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism." [1]

To fight our inner biases and to rise above our primate nature, Mlodinow proposes:

• reacting to events instead of relying on the capability of predicting them
• increasing personal qualities like: perseverance, flexibility, and confidence. I'm all in for that!
• relying on the direct impression we get of other peope rather than their reputation and past accomplishments. Any new interaction should be taken as a clean slate, huh?

These are only a few means through which we could overcome our tendencies to make judgments in an automatic-deterministic way.

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Ending Thoughts

Leonard Mlodinow brings another layer of understanding to the modern-day pseudoscientific self-help talk by saying that no matter how much you fail, if you keep trying, chances are that you'll eventually succeed (simple stats). He ends in a positive note:

"What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, 'If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.'"[1]

Returning to the question from the introduction, why would a physicist of Mlodinow's prestige write a book with Deepak Chopra, an avid advocate for alternative medicine and spirituality? Here's how it all started:

It can but only amuse me when self-proclaimed gurus make use of words such as 'quantum', without actually having the slightest understanding of their meaning, often with the intention to appear sophisticated and unintelligible, often with the intention to deceive.

Mlodinow's book with Chopra, War of Worldviews - Where Science and Spirituality Meet - And Do Not, is said to have grown along with their friendship, and it is a debate on evolution and life, God, the human brain and other questions of great importance to humanity. I have it on my radar; so, it's a matter of time until I get my hands on it.

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Citations from:

1. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives

Credits for Images: Amazon and Wellcome Library, London, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author