[Book] People, Perception, Perfection, and Randomness

 Perfection requires perfect perception. It is hard to achieve perfection, since the data we perceives is rarely perfect. So how do we determine whether what we perceive is true. In a more technical term, how do we accept or reject the hypothesis based on what we perceived? In this respect, statisticians resort to "Significant Testing" in order to make decision based on observations.

"Human perception is very narrow. There is only about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina center which has high resolution. Outside this region, the resolution drops off sharply. Therefore, we tend to move our eyes a lot to compensate for the narrow visual area."

People cannot perceive randomness when they see it, and they cannot produce it when they try. For example, if a random number generator generates several consecutive ‘0’, how much would you trust that generator? When Apple first introduced a shuffle function with true random in their iPod, some songs came up few times in a short playlist. People complained that the shuffle function isn't truly random. Apple ended up using less random function to make people feel that the shuffle function was more random. People cannot differentiate between a process being random, and the random outcomes of the process.

Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 9 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part] [Read the Next Part].


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.