Gods and Expectation

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal is known as the person who invented the Pascal's Triangle, whose elements are the number of ways to arrange N objects in M places.

But, the story that drew my interest is that he is also the inventor of expectation. And, even more interesting is how he came up with the concept of expectation. Here we go....


Gods, Pious, and Expectation

Pascal conceived the expectation concept when he pondered whether he should believe in Gods. This is what he thought. If God exists the payoff for being pious is infinity. However, if God does not exist, the payoff will be insignificant. To account for the uncertainty of Gods' existance, he multiplied the probability that God exists and does not exist with correspondent payoffs, and added both the products together. That is what he called "expectation". Since the result was infinity, he concluded that regardless of whether God exists everybody should be pious.

Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 4 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part] [Read the Next Part].

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.