我说过。个人生活尚且如此,不提国家民族了。
Who's in Control Here?
Chance and laziness determine our lives more than we think -- but we're not helpless.
Reviewed by Christopher Shea
Sunday, June 29, 2008; BW10
THE DRUNKARD'S WALK
How Randomness Rules Our Lives
By Leonard Mlodinow | Pantheon. 252 pp. $24.95
NUDGE
Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, And Happiness
By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Yale Univ. 293 pp. $26
Leonard Mlodinow has had, to speak informally, a pretty random career: He earned a PhD in physics from Berkeley, wrote for "MacGyver" and "Star Trek" and has now settled down as a science popularizer.
A far more sober instance of randomness, however, underpins his new book, The Drunkard's Walk. And it's not hard to see it as a sort of Rosebud, explaining why the author finds unpredictability so compelling. During World War II in the Nazi death-camp Buchenwald, his father and other starving inmates had been told they'd be killed one-by-one until someone confessed to stealing some bread that had gone missing. Upon confessing, Mlodinow's guilty father was not executed, as expected, but promoted to serve as the chef's assistant. A different capricious decision then, and the author Leonard Mlodinow would not exist today.
It's been said that what divides liberals and conservatives is the degree to which each thinks luck plays a role in where one ends up in life. For Mlodinow, "There but for the grace of God" is a mathematical (if not theological) truth. In A Drunkard's Walk, which takes its title from scientific slang for a purely random succession of events, Mlodinow argues that it is quintessentially human to stamp the results of largely arbitrary processes as, in retrospect, inevitable.
Shifting from his own family's encounters with fate, for example, he notes that it is hard to imagine a world without Harry Potter, yet publishers rejected J.K. Rowling's manuscript nine times before someone finally said yes. There's a self-helpish lesson here: Whether we succeed in life is partly out of our hands -- think of the other worthy authors whose manuscripts languish in desk drawers -- but by persisting we offer lightning more chances to strike.
Sandwiched in this book between a morally freighted opening and conclusion is a primer on the science of probability. "Probability is the very guide of life," Cicero wrote. If so, most of us are mapless. We put our money in the hands of moneymen with the best records over the past (say) five years, ignoring research that demonstrates that these big-swinging stockpickers are as likely as their peers to wind up at the bottom of the pile over the next five-year period.
Even the scientifically literate can be confounded by probability. Mlodinow once tested positive for HIV, at which point his doctor sadly told him that there was a 99.9 percent chance he had a death sentence. But the doctor had failed to properly balance the 1-in-1,000 chance of a false positive against the 1 in 10,000 chance that a man in Mlodinow's demographic (heterosexual, married, white, non-IV-drug-user) had the virus. Within that group, only 1 in 11 people who test positive is truly infected; Mlodinow wasn't.
Once in a while, Mlodinow sends you scurrying for a statistics textbook when he ventures into deeper mathematical waters or skips steps in his explanations, but when things get slow, there's usually a diverting historical detour. This is the kind of book in which you learn that Pascal, after he set aside his work on statistics, took to wearing "an iron belt with points on the inside so that he was in constant discomfort," lest the siren song of happiness tempt him.
Nudge, in contrast, is a much more policy-oriented book. It comes with substantial advance publicity, thanks in part to the imprimatur of Sen. Barack Obama, who has embraced some of the authors' proposals, which are underpinned by libertarian paternalism. ("Paternalism" because the authors want to steer people to make better choices; "libertarian" because they feel people should still be free to make bad ones.)
Like Mlodinow, Richard Thaler, a pioneer of so-called behavioral economics, and Cass Sunstein, a noted law professor, discuss numerous studies that show just how far short humans fall from the ideal of homo economicus. Inertia, herd behavior, ignorance of odds, and egotism conspire to cause people to make bad decisions and poor predictions. (Typically, only 5 percent of Thaler's business school students say that they will end up in the bottom half of his class.)
Thaler and Sunstein's best-known proposal has to do with 401(k) plans. When people fail to sign up for such plans, they are leaving money on the table -- especially when employers match employees' contributions -- not to mention raising the odds they'll be subsisting on chunk light tuna in retirement. One study found that enrolling workers automatically in these plans -- switching from an "opt in" system to "opt out" -- drove participation in the plans from 65 percent to 98 percent.
In the arena of organ donation, switching to an opt-out system could save thousands of lives annually. One study in Iowa found that 97 percent of residents supported organ transplantation, yet only 43 percent of those people had checked the relevant box on their driver's license application. That gap could be closed if participation in organ-donor programs were the default position. If opt-in seems too aggressive when it comes to bodily organs, even a "forced choice" could improve the situation. Demanding that people give a clear yes or no would surely raise the number of donors, given the popularity of the concept.
Some nudges might be purely informational. How much of the current mortgage crisis would have been averted had prospective homeowners been presented with a clear, readable document laying out some of the bad-case scenarios when their low, teaser interest rates ended?
And there's more! What about a debit card explicitly reserved for charitable donations, which would make it a cinch to keep track of tax deductions and encourage more giving? Or software that detects uncivil language in your e-mail and asks if you really want to send it?
In the end, it must be said, the profusion of proposals in Nudge, however worthy, and the countless summaries of studies supporting them grow a bit wearisome. As influential as the book is likely to be, it's hard to imagine it pushing its way alongside Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (inferior social science, far breezier style) on the bestseller list. Then again, who dares judge the odds of the publishing biz? None of us knows when lightning will strike. ·
Christopher Shea, a Washington-based writer, is the Boston Globe Ideas section's "Brainiac" columnist.
- Re: 好书评:机遇主宰生活posted on 07/03/2008
哎,我们最害怕承认的就是人生而没有目的,历史没有目的,生命的进化没有目的。回头看,一切都是朝着今天来的,仿佛一切就都有个目的似的,对一切的解析也都振振有辞,一厢情愿也是自欺欺人。
所谓性格决定命运,就是offer lightning more chances to strike的意思了吧? - posted on 07/03/2008
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Charles Bukowski
US (German-born) author & poet (1920 - 1994)
浮生 wrote:
哎,我们最害怕承认的就是人生而没有目的,历史没有目的,生命的进化没有目的。回头看,一切都是朝着今天来的,仿佛一切就都有个目的似的,对一切的解析也都振振有辞,一厢情愿也是自欺欺人。
所谓性格决定命运,就是offer lightning more chances to strike的意思了吧?
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