photo credit: stephcarterLeonard Mlodinow, a physicist/author who also, apparantly, understands the impact of random events and the ‘illusion of control’ in everyday life. In this talk he adresses randomness, the illusion of control, probability misinterpretations (i.e. in medicine, sports), psychology (i.e. Kahnemann, Taversky) etc., basically the insights similar to The Black Swan.
He talks about randomness, confirmation bias, unpredictabile events, silent evidence, statistical fallacies, ludic fallacies, the illusion of control etc. and gives more examples than explanations. It all comes down to the same; the impact of the random, highly unpredictable high impact events in life and some of the psychological traps we tend to fall into without realizing.
But anyhow, despite the lack of explanations here and there these are entertaining talks to watch, especially if you’re familiar with The Black Swans and randomness in general.
He even wrote a book in 2008 about randomness and complexity in social situations… Hmm, sounds familiar?!
I would say; thumbs up for the mindset, a thumb down for originality…
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About Leonard Mlodinow:
As a physicist at California Institute of Technology and the author of many books and articles, a number of them on the science of probability, Leonard Mlodinow spends a lot of time considering the question, What are the odds?Leonard Mlodinow teaches randomness to future experimenters at Caltech. His books include “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” and “Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace.” More of his writing and information about his work can be found at his Web site.
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