The human mind is a fool for order, says physicist Leonard Mladinow. We love order, crave order, and will see order even where there is, in fact, mainly chaos.
The random looms huge in world affairs, he says, but we don’t want to hear about it. We’re blind to it. And it leads us to all kinds of false assumptions, he says, in business, in entertainment, in sports — in stock-picking and baseball and the search for box-office magic.
More than we know, says Mladinow, randomness rules our lives.
This hour, On Point: We look at chance, odds, order, and the reign of the random.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Leonard Mlodinow, physicist, professor at Caltech, and author of “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.”
David Picker, movie producer, former head of United Artists, Paramount and Columbia Pictures.
Tags: books, chance, physics, random
