Book Review – ‘The Drunkard’s Walk,’ by Leonard Mlodinow – Review – NYTimes.com

When statistics are used in a court of law the effect can be just as misleading. Mlodinow recalls the O. J. Simpson trial, in which the prosecution depicted the defendant as an inveterate wife abuser. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, countered with statistics: in the United States, four million women are battered every year by their male partners, yet only one in 2,500 is ultimately murdered by her partner.

The jury may have found that persuasive, but it’s a spurious argument. Nicole Brown Simpson was already dead. The relevant question was what percentage of all battered women who are murdered are killed by their abusers. The answer, Mlodinow notes, didn’t come up in the trial. It was 90 percent.

Lawyers, it seems, are no better than doctors at this kind of math. But juries are even worse.

Excellent example. The first statistic, prima facie, has some relevance. The scales fall from our eyes only when the question is formulated in the correct way. Salutary.

Oliver Burkeman: This column will change your life | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health

…the psychologist Neal Roese explains in his book, If Only, “If you decide to do something and it turns out badly, research shows that it probably won’t haunt you down the road. You’ll reframe the failure and move on. But you will regret the things left undone.” You’ll regret them for longer, too, because they’re “imaginatively boundless”: you can lose yourself for ever in the infinite possibilities of what might have been. In other words: you know that thing you’ve been wondering about doing? Do it. 

‘… if one were to probe into them, one would surely find that the feeling which dominated him and excluded him from the river party was alive in them too, but of course with the difference that it was very far from dominating them and merely haunted some darker corners of their being.’
A strange confluence: Kafka, Ford and the Thames!

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2006/12/sea-closes-up-and-so-does-land.html