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On June 18, 1964, about 11:30 a.m. Mrs. Juanita Brooks, who had been shopping, was walking home along an alley in the San Pedro area of the city of Los Angeles. She was pulling behind her a wicker basket carryall containing groceries and had her purse on top of the packages. She was using a cane. As she stooped down to pick up an empty carton, she was suddenly pushed to the ground by a person whom she neither saw nor heard approach. She was..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein plagiarized relativity from his mailman, don't tell him, 'You life is a cruel joke' and walk away. Have tea with him. It can broaden your style of thinking, and it's cheaper than seeing a therapist.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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People expect good luck to follow bad luck, or they worry that bad will follow good.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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true randomness sometimes produces repetition,
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Thomas Edison is often said to have advised, "To have a great idea, have a lot of them."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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recent years psychologists have found that the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is at least as important a factor in success as talent.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Thus even random patterns can be interpreted as compelling evidence if they relate to our preconceived notions.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn't invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an "hour" might be more than twice as long in June as in December (in London, for example, it varied from 38 to 82 of today's minutes)."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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0c4cc92
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We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that your boss will respond to your e-mails more slowly than before. But your boss might be slower in responding because she is unusually busy or her mother is ill. And so the chances that your star is falling if she is taking longer to respond are ..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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2a57ed8
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At the University of Bologna, there was another bizarre twist on what is the norm today: students fined their professors for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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5523506
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a bishop should not be condemned except with seventy-two witnesses... a cardinal priest should not be condemned except with forty-four witnesses, a cardinal deacon of the city of Rome without thirty-six witnesses, a subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, lector, or doorkeeper except with seven witnesses.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b442a25
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Fewer than eight hundred Americans earn a Ph.D. in physics each year. Worldwide, the number is probably in the thousands. And yet from this small pool comes the discovery and innovation that shapes the way we live and think. From X-rays, lasers, radio waves, transistors, atomic energy--and atomic weapons--to our view of space and time, and the nature of the universe, all this has arisen from this dedicated pool of individuals. To be a physi..
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influence
science
physics
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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The researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people often hesitate or sugarcoat their true opinion. Suppose I ask my students, "Did you like my discussion of the stochastic nature of the"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. --Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Historians, whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling.... But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."6"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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0ef1e42
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moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the song. Again, it's the butterfly effect.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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there remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God's whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year--almost fifty years after Galileo's condemnation--the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn't.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn't seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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American people whether they agree that plants create the oxygen in the air, light travels faster than sound, or you cannot make radioactive milk safe by boiling it, you will get double-digit disagreement in each case (13 percent, 24 percent, and 35 percent, respectively
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child's third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Do we, like the flight instructors, believe that harsh criticism improves our children's behavior or our employees' performance?
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Cardano worked at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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One trader even believed that relieving himself in the "wrong" toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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That brings us back to the default mode. "When your mind is at rest, what it is really doing is bouncing thoughts back and forth," Andreasen says. "Your association cortices are always running in the background, but when you are not focused on some task--for example, when you are doing something mindless, like driving--that's when your mind is most free to roam. That's why that is when you most actively create new ideas."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Let all the disciples of Aristotle...," he would write, "recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics."6"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Annoyed that although outlawed in Rome, astrology was nevertheless alive and well, Cicero noted that at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal, leading about 50,000 Carthaginian and allied troops, crushed the much larger Roman army, slaughtering more than 60,000 of its 80,000 soldiers. "Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope?" Cicero asked. "Yet all had one and the same end."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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5c4b2b0
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A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his "accomplishment," he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. "I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights," he said, "and 7 times 7 is 48."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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0c1c17f
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The lesson is that, though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel "burnt out." That's good to know when scheduling your tasks--you could be better at generating imaginative ideas if you do that kind of thinking after working on a chore that involves a period of tedious, focused effort that strains your powers of concentration."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different. --JAMES BORG
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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the elasticity of our thinking allows us to move beyond the existing world of our senses and invent new concepts.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense.
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Leonard Mlodinow |