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The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day
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Most helpful customer reviews
78 of 83 people found the following review helpful.
"It Can't Happen" Happens All the Time
By Rob Hardy
Years ago my wife was looking through the books at a Goodwill store, and for a gag gift for my birthday she bought me a volume of poems by Rod McKuen, whose work I do not like. Helen brought it home and was going to wrap it when she looked inside. There was a dedication in the book signed by the author himself: “To Rob - May you always sleep warm. --Rod McKuen.” Now I have a volume of McKuen’s poetry I cannot throw away, but more to the point, how is it possible that completely by chance that she should pick up such a book bearing a dedication to someone of the same name? It just does not seem that such a thing could happen. It’s the sort of story told many times in _The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day_ (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by mathematician David Hand. Hand knows that it is tough to write about mathematics for the layman, perhaps even more so for probability which he says “is renowned for its counterintuitive nature, more than any other area of mathematics. Even the most eminent mathematicians have been tripped up by it.” Yet there are few equations here, there are many astounding stories, and many of Hand’s explanations are drawn from tossing a humble die.
The book starts with its main contradiction, only a seeming contradiction and one of many explained away within these pages: How is it possible that extremely unlikely things happen, and not only happen, but happen over and over? Hand gives satisfying answers, but besides being a book about extraordinarily improbable events, this is also a book that explains probability in general. Take the law of inevitability: Something has to happen. In a lottery, each possible ticket has so tiny a chance of winning that you might think it a miracle if yours is the one chosen. But what _is_ certain is that some ticket will be picked to win (or if not, the stakes will be raised for the next draw when there will be a winner). It is thus dead certain that an improbable event will occur. There’s the law of truly large numbers: if there are enough possible opportunities, any outrageously unlikely event can happen. If you toss a coin enough times, and have a near-eternity to do so, you will get a run of a hundred heads; it simply has to happen. These are understood strictly with probability theory, but we have also to supplement our “understanding” of rare events by human foibles. The law of selection, for instance, says that you can make probabilities as high as you like, in retrospect. It’s like shooting arrows into the side of a barn and then painting bullseyes around each one. All of us are liable, too, to confirmation bias; we notice events that reinforce what we wish to believe and we disregard data that does not fit. Prophets and astrologers harness this tendency all the time. And sometimes we use bad equipment for our research. Federal law has specific and strict rules for every die thrown in a casino, but dice you get in a Monopoly set are far from such strict engineering and they have bias; research into psychokinesis, the ability to control die tosses, has been criticized because it used ordinary dice.
Readers of Hand’s book will have a happy tour of many aspects of probability, delivered by a guide who is knowledgeable and funny. Even if some of the math gets by you, the astonishing stories are sure to impress you, like the ones about people who have won the lottery more than once. Spare a little sympathy, however, for Maureen Wilcox, who in 1980 bought lottery tickets in both the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She picked all the right numbers, too. Except the numbers she picked for Rhode Island won in Massachusetts, and vice versa.
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Dull as it gets
By Skeptical by nature
I've read a lot of books on statistics, both texts for work and more casual books for entertainment value. This is among the worst that I have read.
The examples are dull, recycled, and mostly uninteresting. The concepts seem too basic for the length of the book. And in the end it just is not interesting. Pass on this one.
When I read one star reviews, I often wish the reviewers would tell me what they did enjoy, so that I could calibrate their review and, potentially, so that I could find something better. So here I'll do that. Here are two books of similar nature, both of which are far better than The Improbability Principle:
1, The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow
2, Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Perception versus Reality: An Excellent Overview
By George Poirier
This is a book on statistics but without the mathematical details. The author explains the occurrence of events that one would expect to be extremely rare but, do in fact occur more frequently that anticipated. The author’s “improbably principle”, which is at the heart of this book, is composed of several strands: the law of inevitability, the law of truly large numbers, the law of selection, the law of the probability lever and the law of near enough. These laws are each carefully explained by the author and several useful examples are presented to illustrate each one.
No formulas are used in this book. To be honest, I found that a bit disappointing being an avid mathematics enthusiast. However, it seems clear that the author’s objective is to drive his point home in the simplest and most widely accessible way possible. And in this he succeeds admirably.
The author, a professor of mathematics with specialization in statistics, writes very clearly in a friendly, engaging and often lively style. Because if its wide accessibility, I believe that this book can be enjoyed by any interested readers, no matter what their background. Science and mathematics enthusiasts, like me, although possibly disappointed by the lack of mathematical minutiae, should still be in for a treat. I enjoyed this book immensely.
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