Q3 Blog post 5

In this blog post i will be analyzing and summarizing the book The drunkard's walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives pages 186-202. To open this section Mlodinow discusses how our views of randomness are quite inaccurate. Mlodinow uses the examples of Statscian George Langer. Langer had an expiremental lottery in which half of the subjects could choose what lottery card they got and the other half were assigned. The way you won was if your card's double was selected in a pot. He then gave the subjects a chance to trade/sell their cards. The people who choose their cards sold their cards for 4times more, even though they had the exact same probability of winning. Misconceptions such as this are extremly common in everyday life. Another such example is when presented with the number set 2,4,6,8 what is the pattern? Most people say that the numbers are increasing even numbers. However Mlodinow points out that just because there isn't an odd number in there it doesn't mean that it has to be even. As the number set could be 2,3,4,5. The cause of this misconception is explained quite well by Francis Bacon, "the human understanding once it has adopted an pinion collects any instances that confirm it" (189). This goes to show that when humans have an idea they will support it instead of trying to discredit it.
The next topic that Mlodinow touches on is how all this randomness affects our lives. "The only way i have to describe the way that randomness truly affects our lives is the title of this book, The Drunkard's Walk" (195). For example why had the U.S. not been prepared for pearl harbor? Given all the facts leading up to the event, we intercepted messages stating that spies should divide the harbor into 5 sections and classify them, then the Japanese change their radio signals when they shouldn't (this ussually signals a large scale operation) then we intercept more messages telling all diplomats to burn all of their official documents! And a large majority of U.S. officers knew about this. The explanition is due to the law of assymetry which basically states that you cannot predict random events before they happen. I will delve into more detail in my next blog post.