Leonard Mlodinow, author of “the drunkard’s walk” talks at google-

The author here talks about randomness and its effects on daily lives i.e how randomness rules our lives.
The author talks about an incident when a man wins a lottery by choosing the last two digits as 48 not
by luck but by choice because he calculated 7 times 7 48. Everyone does this in their daily lives.
Whenever we randomly choose a number , in our subconscience we use certain numbers we like, we
multiply them, divide them randomly and final choose a number by these results.

Then the author talks about drunkard’s walk where a drunk walks randomly from one place to another
but in the end by looking at his path one can think that he did it on purpose.

Then the author talks about law of large numbers i.e probability of occurence of certain event increases
if no. of sample events increase. Let us understand this with an example i.e probability of getting two
heads if we toss two coins simultaneously 4 times is less but if we toss them millions of times then this
probability might increase. Another example is of two teams playing against each other. One team is
superior and one is inferior i.e 55/45 chances of winning. If they play a series best of 7 then probability
of winning of inferior team is 40% but if they play 45 matches then probability is 25% only and it
decreases to 5% only if they play 269 matches.

Then he talks about conditional probability. He takes a sample of 100 women in which 10 have false
positive of cancer (probability of false positive is 10%) then if a patient has a positive test the probability
that she actually has cancer is only 9%. Then the author talks about the illusion of control i.e people tend
unconsciously to feel they have control over random events. True even if consciously they know they do
not. An experiment was conducted in yale university in which students were asked to toss a coin 30
times and guess the outcome and the experimenter told them a predetermined sequence of right or
wrong. The result of experiment was what was expected. Then they were asked if their performance
would improve with practice, 40 % said yes and if their performance was hampered by distraction, 20%
said yes to this.

Second illusion discussed was expectation bias i.e perception of reality is affected by expectations For
example an experiment was conducted in Caltech where cheap wines were marked with high prices and
their brains were mapped using MRI, pleasure center of their brains actually got excited more when
they tasted cheap wine with high marked price but not when they tasted costly wine with cheap marked
price.

In the last author discussed the result of an experiment conducted on audience before the lecture
started in which they were asked about how many countries are there in Africa ?

The talk was ended by a quote by Thomas J. Watson –“ if you want to succeed, double your failure rate“.

Probability of data shown in media is not absolute but it depends on randomness, conditional
probability, expectation bias. And my perception of shown probability in media will be based on these.