Notes on The Drunkard's Walk - But Not Really

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Out Lives

Leonard Mlodinow, 2008

I was pretty disappointed overall because he doesn't talk about the drunkard's walk until the last chapter. No saccades, no Levy-walks, no foraging behavior or network science. Just another boring-ass book about the same old stuff that always gets the same average people excited, because they've never yet in their lives heard of cognitive fallacies or the law of large numbers. I wanted to learn about randomness - tell me something about procedurally-generated video games or quantum random number generators. Tell me things that I don't already know. Or at least tell me about the thing that titled the book. Alas, this book was not for me.

Regardless, some notes:

• Cicero on Astrology (which he did not like, as he was a man of numbers) - "Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope? Yet all had one and the same end." (p32) -Cicero quoted in F. N. David, "Gods, Games and Gambling: A History of Probability and Statistical Ideas (Mineola, N.Y.:Dover Publications, 1998), pp.24-26
• On the law of large numbers and just statistics in general - John Kerrich, South African mathematician, 1940's, flips a coin 10,000 times. (he was a prisoner of war at the time). After 100 throws he had 44 heads; by 10,000 he had 5,067 heads. (p95) -Statistics by David Freedman, Robert Pisani and Roger Purves in 1998. pp274-275
• Bayes conditional probability and conspiracy theories: they depend on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen IF it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists IF a series of events occurs (p107); OR LIKE a guy that beats his wife is also a cop VS a guy that's a cop that also beats his wife; OR a husband would sneak around IF he were having an affair VS a husband having an affair IF he were sneaking around; OR a person is mentally ill if he believes they're after him VS a person is being targeted if he is mentally ill. (One of these is way more probable than the other, and because of Bayesian conditional probability.)

• (I'm being petty here, but I find it funny that the author uses the 1963 wine-color study to talk about cognitive override, which is a bad study anyway because it intentionally tricks experts who are trained to use BOTH color AND taste to do their job, but then in 2008 another wine study was done  using MRI and found they actually liked the more expensive wines more; but in reality recent studies in neuroscience show that any MRI studies with less than 1,000 participants can't produce statistically significant results due to natural variation among brains, so this study being used in a book about statistics is ironic.)

• 1850's "table moving" as emergent phenomenon (p170)
• -Ray Hyman, "Parapsychological Research: A Tutorial Review and Critical Appraisal," Proceedings of the IEEE 74, no. 6 (June 1986): 823-49.
• -Michael Faraday, "Experimental Investigation of Table-Moving" Athenaeum, July 2, 1853, pp.801-3.

• One of the most well-known contemporary examples of randomness - the iPod shuffle (p175)

• Stocks - "There is much evidence, for instance, that the performance of stocks is random -- or so close to being random that in the absence of insider information and in the presence of a cost to make trades or manage your portfolio, you can't profit from any deviations from randomness. (p176) -Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, 2003 edition
• Stocks cont'd - Nevertheless, Wall Street has a long tradition of guru analysts, and the average analyst's salary, at the end of the 1900's was about $3 million (ft 15). How do these analysts do? According to a 1995 study, the eight to twelve most highly paid "Wall Street Superstars" invited by Barron's to make market recommendations at its annual roundtable merely matched the average market return (ft 16). Studies in 1987 and 1997 found that stocks recommended by the prognosticators on the television show Wall Street Week did much worse, lagging far behind the market (ft 17). And in a study of 153 newsletters, a researcher at Harvard Institute of Economic Research found "no significant evidence of stock-picking ability." (ft 18) (p176)

15. Investment Blunders of the Rich and Famous, John R Nofsinger, 2002

16. An Analysis of the Recomendations of the 'Superstar' money Managers at Barron's Annual Roundtable, Hemang Desai and Prem C. Jain, 1995

17. Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser's Recommendations: Trading Activity and Performance, Jess Beltz and Robert Jennings, 1997; Wall $treet Week Recommendations: Yes or No?, robert A Pari, 1987

18. Performance Evaluation with Transactions Data: The Stock Selection of Investment Newsletters, Andrew Matrick, 1999; The Equity Performance of Investment Newsletters, 1997

Technology and Social Complexity

[from back in the day when books had only one title and no subtitle]

Maurice N. Richter Jr., State University of New York Press, Albany, 1982

• The rain dances perform a latent function for the tribe, by keeping morale and cohesion, and thus persists, despite not actually making it rain. (p10)
• "The first machines were people." -Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1963 (p11)
• Organizational technology vs the material, chemical technology and engineering technology of using deadly chemicals sprayed from planes to kill blackbirds all over America - China's war against the sparrow - One morning in 1957, the population of Beijing was organized in a "war against the sparrow", which commenced at 4:45am. The plan was to station people everywhere -- on roofs, in the branches of trees, in streets, in fields -- so the sparrows when flushed from their resting places all over the city would find no place to land and would eventually drop exhausted to the ground. -SeeHan Suyin, "The Sparrow Shall Fall," New Yorker 10 Oct 1959 (p13)
• "Much that Red men know, they forget. They have no way to preserve it. White men make what they know fast on paper like catching a wild animal and taming it." -cited by George F Foster. Se-quo-yah: The American Cadmus(?) and Modern Moses (Philadelphia: Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1885; republished by AMS, 1979), p92.
• Sequoyah eventually made his own alphabet and system of writing, and he called it "talking leaves".
• The Sequoyah Accident and Accidental Innovation - He thought he was imitating the White man when he constructed a system of writing for his people. However, he did not understand enough about the White man's alphabet to know that he was not merely imitating it but was actually improving upon it: his script apparently made it possible for Cherokee youth to learn to read simple messages in a very few days, something that White youth using their alphabet could not usually do. (p69) 
• On the evolution of technology - "A deliberately constructed writing system is maximally "technological" at the time of its construction. If it remains frozen while relevant circumstances (e.g., pronunciations) change, it will still presumably involve a technological aspect insofar as it is a "means" for achieving certain communicative "ends," but its technological status will be diminished by its growing entanglement in unquestioned tradition". (p17)

• On using technological criteria for classifying societies:
• eotechnic - water and wood
• paleotechnic - coal and iron
• neotechnic - electricity and alloy (p26)
• -Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilization. 1963

• Benjamin Franklin's stove was intended to substitute American wood for imported coal (p47) -Gerald Holton, Daedalus 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 10.

Notes on The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind

by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, 1988

It's a book about how society was turned inside out by the spread of writing in the Middle Ages.

• While talking about the origins of written language in prehistoric societies -- "Writing is the only technique we know of for making the flow of speech coagulate and for carrying clots of language along intact for tens or even hundreds of years ... nuggets of frozen speech can be carried along in culture. (p5-6)
• "The new use of documents together with a new way of shaping the written page, turned writing, which in the Early and High Middle Ages had been extolled and honored as a mysterious embodiment of the Word of God, into a constituent-element in the mediation of mundane relations." (p32)
• "The swearing of an oath makes the word visible -- not on paper but in the living body of the person concerned," and guaranteed by the family, clan and society. (p34)
• And then everything changes and you swear on your Bible and not on your beard. 

• On time in text, from relative to absolute - Time used to be related to significant events that people would remember, a feast, a wedding, a visit from a sovereign. "By the end of the 14th century, the date on a charter could even be tied to the mechanical tower-clock ... Memory grew a new dimension. Memories could now be shelved behind each other, not according to their importance or affinity, but according to the date from which they issue." (p42)
• On Writing - You didn't write with pen in hand, you spoke to a scribe (Dictation). (p44-45)
• Last words on a death bed became the last will document.

• By the end of the 13th century, libraries became places of silence. (p51)
• On Latin and the difference between universal Latin and local dialects -- "Every monk learned the Latin pronunciation of his own monastery. If he walked from Subiaco to Fulda, his feet bore him no faster than his ear was able to adjust itself to new pronunciations." (p58)
• Latin as the first language to be written, not exclusively spoken (p59) i.e., a dead language; only a dead language that's not spoken can never change and therefore be referenced throughout history.
• Works are written in Latin, but the reader is supposed to read it aloud in their own vernacular tongue, even if that was French or German. (p61-62)

• reshape -> Latin fingere -> fiction (p84)
• "Only when memory is perceived as a text can thought become a material to be shaped..." The transformation of truth to fiction could only occur with the separation of the first-person subjective "self" experience and the consensual reality experience by writing. (p84)
• Lying didn't exist prior to writing (?).
• Regarding Authorship and ChatGPT - Scribes and clerics used to state that they are not the source, only its channel; likewise the dictator states they did not invent it (with their finger, fingere, fiction) (p86~)
• DeFoe's Plague Year 1772 was the first English novel, i.e., work of fiction (although Canterbury Tales was 1382)
• On Forgetting vs Memory in Literature (p93)
• ...and this is why all the early novels start out saying, "this is a story some other guy told me" like pirate stories and Treasure Island.

• in Plague Year, the "real story" is how the bulletins of deaths (called the Bill of Plague) spread like contagion, but also they lend veracity to the story because they provide certified documents...
• The Plague Bill itself is the protagonist (can't see a virus!)