NOW USING CHROME
The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
I am up to chapter three and I have learned very little and read a twenty page review of the first quarter of a statistics class I took. Here are the first two chapters in summary.
Chapter 1:
- The right side of your brain is 'intuitive' and always tries to find heuristics
- The left side of your brain is 'logical' and always tries to find patterns
- If two events are occuring randomly and event 1 occurs thrice as much as event 2, in guessing which event will occur next, you will be correct more often if you simply choose the event that occurs more often everytime.
- Praising a person for good behavior is more effective than punishing people for bad behavior
- This can seem counter intuitive due to regression toward the mean; that is, after someone does much better than they usually do, it is natural for them to do about as well as they had been doing before that accidental success, the same goes for accidental mistakes.
Chapter 2:
- This is a review of probability rules
- The probability that two events will occur can never be greater than the probability that each event will occur individually
- You can predict the probability that two events will occur by taking the product of the probabilities of the two events ONLY IF the two events are completely independent of each other.
- The probability that, given an event with multiple different and possible outcomes, the probability that one outcome or another outcome will be the result is the sum of the probabilities of two potential outcomes (assuming that the sum of all of the possible outcomes is 1 [100%])
- When making a point about the potential outcomes of an event, make sure you are looking at the correct proability.
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