Q3 blog post 4

In this blog post i will be summarizing and analyzing the Drunkard's Walk how Randomness Rules our Lives pages 146- 185. In the first half of these pages Mlodinow clearly depicts how randomness in social data is actually not chaotic but very oderly "social data seemed to produce qauntifiable and predictable patterns" (152). He goes on to give us examples that seem to be complete chaos but instead are extremly orderly, as a density curve would show. You can take for example a sample of people who are driving cars one year and then count up the miles. Then the next year you can conclude that those miles will be reasonably the same, even with people completly changing what they are going to do, lets say a young girl who used to drive to school everyday gets married and stops moving. Then the milage should go down, however a young man becomes a truck driver and starts driving more often. These two would theorecticaly cancel each other out and since we take the population of a large place, (given that there isn't a significant increase in the drivers between the two years) they will equal out to be about the same. Later on in his book Mlodinow goes to show us the first person who recognized this and started to plot it. Quetelet was his name and he took samples of everything, the chest size of scottish soldiers, to the number of murders in france with what type of weapon it was committed. He found that all of these distributions were bell-shaped and represented a "normal" curve. This curve is now the basis for all statistical studies. The first recorded time this was used to a person's advantage was in the 17th century when a mathematician noticed that his baker was advertising his bread as 1000 grams and he averaged only 950. He plotted the weights of the bread he bought for a year and realized he was being cheated. Later he plotted the weights after complaining and realized that the graph was skewed to the right, meaning that the baker had been giving him a lot of heavier loaves. He complained and the baker changed his ways again.
In the second part of this reading Mlodinow talks about how random paterns are very common and confuse almost every person they come upon. To start off he talks about table turning. This is the process in which people contact the dead and turn a table after awhile the table starts to turn by itself. Scientists began to study this and realized that the people would subconsciensly start to turn the table they thought it would turn. When all the people thought it would turn in one direction they would all subconsciensly start to move the table in that direction. After much study scienctists realized that more often than not the poeple sitting at the table would all think that it would turn the same way. Mlodinow now points out that people analyze incorrectly based on percieved patterns all the time. Just as with seeing your imagination fills in the gaps. When a person looks with their eyes each eye is missing large portions of what is really there and the picture is highly pixilated, however our brain meshes the two eye views together and depixilates the image based on what it would guess is there from the combined information. Our brain does this also with statistics on things causing confusion and misconception. To counter this misconception scientists have developed a mthematical style to find patterns in samples, " To combat this misconception that people have the greater mathematicains came together and formulated a grand idea" (178). This grand idea is based on the curves from earlier and it measures the probabiblity of an event hapenning.