Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [114]
On the technical side, Larry Goldstein and Ted Hill inspired me in numerous fun and exciting mathematical debates and discussions, and gave me invaluable feedback on the manuscript. Fred Rose seemed to have left his job at The Wall Street Journal solely to free up time to lend me advice on the workings of the financial markets. Lyle Long applied his considerable expertise at data analysis to help create the graphs related to fund manager performance. And Christof Koch welcomed me into his lab at Caltech and opened my eyes to the exciting new developments in neuroscience that pepper these pages. Many other friends and colleagues read chapters, sometimes more than one draft, or otherwise provided useful suggestions or information. They include Jed Buchwald, Lynne Cox, Richard Cheverton, Rebecca Forster, Miriam Goodman, Catherine Keefe, Jeff Mackowiak, Cindy Mayer, Patricia McFall, Andy Meisler, Steve Mlodinow, Phil Reed, Seth Roberts, Laura Saari, Matt Salganik, Martin Smith, Steve Thomas, Diane Turner, and Jerry Webman. Thanks to you all. Finally, I owe a profound thank you to my family, Donna, Alexei, Nicolai, Olivia, and to my mother, Irene, from each of whom I often stole time in order that I might improve upon, or at least obsess over, this work.
NOTES
Prologue
1. Stanley Meisler, “First in 1763: Spain Lottery—Not Even War Stops It,” Los Angeles Times, December 30, 1977.
2. On basketball, see Michael Patrick Allen, Sharon K. Panian, and Roy E. Lotz, “Managerial Succession and Organizational Performance: A Recalcitrant Problem Revisited,” Administrative Science Quarterly 24, no. 2 (June 1979): 167–80; on football, M. Craig Brown, “Administrative Succession and Organizational Performance: The Succession Effect,” Administrative Science Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1982): 1–16; on baseball, Oscar Grusky, “Managerial Succession and Organizational Effectiveness,” American Journal of Sociology 69, no. 1 (July 1963): 21–31, and William A. Gamson and Norman A. Scotch, “Scapegoating in Baseball,” American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 1 (July 1964): 69–72; on soccer, Ruud H. Koning, “An Econometric Evaluation of the Effect of Firing a Coach on Team Performance,” Applied Economics 35, no. 5 (March 2003): 555–64.
3. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 218–19.
4. Armen Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 3 (June 1950): 213.
Chapter 1: Peering through the Eyepiece of Randomness
1. Kerstin Preuschoff, Peter Bossaerts, and Steven R. Quartz, “Neural Differentiation of Expected Reward and Risk in Human Subcortical Structures,” Neuron 51 (August 3, 2006): 381–90.
2. Benedetto De Martino et al., “Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain,” Science 313 (August 4, 2006): 684–87.
3. George Wolford, Michael B. Miller, and Michael Gazzaniga, “The Left Hemisphere’s Role in Hypothesis Formation,” Journal of Neuroscience 20: RC64 (2000): 1–4.
4. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1950; repr., Oxford: Routledge, 1996), p. 15.
5. Matt Johnson and Tom Hundt, “Hog Industry Targets State for Good Reason,” Vernon County ( Wisconsin ) Broadcaster, July 17, 2007.
6. Kevin McKean, “Decisions, Decisions,” Discover, June 1985, pp. 22–31.
7. David Oshinsky, “No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov,” New York Times Book Review, September 9, 2007.
8. Press accounts of the number of rejections these manuscripts received vary slightly.
9. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York: Warner Books, 1983), p. 41.
10. See Arthur De Vany, Hollywood Economics (Abington, U.K.: Routledge, 2004).
11. William Feller, An Introduction to Probability