
Talks at Google Ep143 - Leonard Mlodinow | The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
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Apr 30, 2021 AI Snips
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Randomness Rules Our Lives
- Randomness significantly influences our lives, often leading to misinterpretations of events.
- We frequently create false narratives of causality, attributing outcomes to skill or intent when chance plays a larger role.
Lottery Winner's Fallacy
- A man won the lottery with the number 48, attributing it to dreaming of the number 7 seven times (7x7=48).
- This highlights our tendency to invent causal explanations, even if nonsensical, for random occurrences.
Illusion of Causality
- We often misattribute success to skill, overlooking the role of randomness, like in Bill Miller's 15-year streak.
- Considering the large number of fund managers, such streaks are statistically likely to occur by chance alone.
