Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [115]
12. Leonard Mlodinow, “Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 2, 2006.
13. Dave McNary, “Par Goes for Grey Matter,” Variety, January 2, 2005.
14. Ronald Grover, “Paramount’s Cold Snap: The Heat Is On,” BusinessWeek, November 21, 2003.
15. Dave McNary, “Parting Gifts: Old Regime’s Pics Fuel Paramount Rebound,” Variety, August 16, 2005.
16. Anita M. Busch, “Canton Inks Prod’n Pact at Warner’s,” Variety, August 7, 1997.
17. “The Making of a Hero,” Time, September 29, 1961, p. 72. The old-timer was Rogers Hornsby.
18. “Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris: The Photographic Essay,” Life, August 18, 1961, p. 62.
19. For those who don’t know baseball, the plate is a rubber slab embedded in the ground, which a player stands before as he attempts to hit the ball. For those who do know baseball, please note that I included walks in my definition of opportunities. If the calculation is redone employing just official at bats, the result is about the same.
20. See Stephen Jay Gould, “The Streak of Streaks,” New York Review of Books, August 18, 1988, pp. 8–12 (we’ll come back to their work in more detail later). A compelling and mathematically detailed analysis of coin-toss models in sports appears in chapter 2 of a book in progress by Charles M. Grinstead, William P. Peterson, and J. Laurie Snell, tentatively titled Fat Chance; www.math.dartmouth.edu/-prob/prob/NEW/bestofchance.pdf.
Chapter 2: The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths
1. Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 90–98.
2. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review 90, no. 4 (October 1983): 293–315.
3. Craig R. Fox and Richard Birke, “Forecasting Trial Outcomes: Lawyers Assign Higher Probabilities to Possibilities That Are Described in Greater Detail,” Law and Human Behavior 26, no. 2 (April 2002): 159–73.
4. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Boston: Colonial Press, 1899), p. 116.
5. Plato, Theaetetus (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004), p. 25.
6. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973): 207–32.
7. Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology and Judgement of Decision Making (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001), p. 87.
8. Robert M. Reyes, William C. Thompson, and Gordon H. Bower, “Judgmental Biases Resulting from Differing Availabilities of Arguments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, no. 1 (1980): 2–12.
9. Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 15–17.
10. Cicero, quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1:179.
11. Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 86.
12. Kline, Mathematical Thought, pp. 178–79.
13. Cicero, quoted in Warren Weaver, Lady Luck (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1982), p. 53.
14. Cicero, quoted in F. N. David, Gods, Games and Gambling: A History of Probability and Statistical Ideas (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1998), pp. 24–26.
15. Cicero, quoted in Bart K. Holland, What Are the Chances? Voodoo Deaths, Office Gossip, and Other Adventures in Probability (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 24.
16. Ibid., p. 25.
17. James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 4, 8.
18. Quoted ibid., p. 13.
19. Quoted ibid., p. 14.
20. William C. Thompson, Franco Taroni, and Colin G. G. Aitken, “How the Probability of a False