The is another one of those fascinating books that I would put into the category of "behavioural economics". To be fair, it probably has a much wider appeal than that and will be of interest to anyone interested in popular science.The book provides fascinating insights into the way our brains are wired and the way that we process probability and randomness can lead us to misinterpret events. For example, if we take the three events below and ask people to rank them in order of their probability, they will often put C before A or B. Yet, statistically it is the least probable (based on both A and B have to happen so it is impossible for the probability to be less than A or B).
A. My company's profits will increase next year
B. The economic climate will improve next year
C. My company's profits will increase next year and the economic climate will improve next year
Why is this? As Mlodinow puts it "if the details we are given fit our mental picture of something then the more details in the scenario, the more real it seems and hence the more probable we consider it to be - even though any act of adding less than certain details to a conjecture makes the conjecture less probable".
Fascinating stuff! And this book is full of such examples based on our peculiarly human understanding of conditional probability and randomness. In fact, I got halfway through this book and found it amusing that I was finding conditional probability so interesting! Just goes to show how well written it is! Highly recommended.
