The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

Some good stuff and some food for thought in this book. There were fun things I've never heard of, such as the "monster" number, and the obscure mysteries of Pi number (and that is not for ' private investigator'). Since most likely myself consist of 78% scientist and 22% mystic (but a really big whopping, power-packed mystic %), I can appreciate the bulk of the material in this book which covers a "fun with numbers" gamut, but the more loose sort of material in the bookl - that bald, "sock-it-to-me-in-your-gut" type of material (if you are paying attention)..well, Wow. The one sentence in the whole book which struck me as rock bottom canyon floor truth for all the fun with numbers (which was steadily melting into the sea of mystic floor), was when Hand said out-loud that there was "something about books". " Yigghhh! cries the indigent Indian who believes in dreams!"(my quote). Something about books, eh? At least one other reviewer in amazon review replied with a tale of a book which travels back to its original owner. Does this book have volition? Is it always meaninglessly coincidental when these things happen, Mr. Hand, per your improbability model? You mostly seem to be implying that it is meaningless, though that one sentence gives your sentiment away...."There is something about books." Indeed there is. And there is something about visions of angels which appear to people in distress, or people who might serve as rescuers. Well, unfortunately, this book only reaches about one quarter of its audience, and maybe those who are 50% scientist and 50% mystic.

You are at the craps table and the 12 rolls four times in a row. The odds of that happening are immense. At blackjack, two people come to the table at the same time and both get blackjacks --- back to back. After that you watch their play and they are not advantage players. They don’t even know basic strategy. A guy hits two inside numbers in a row at roulette. Then he bets the outside red and black and wins six in a row!The same woman wins two lotteries in New Jersey. Two people, a father and a son, have train accidents on the same day in two separate years. Someone is hit by lightning not twice but three times. You are thinking of a friend from years back and the next day that friend contacts you on Facebook.These all seem to be amazing events. Yet, how amazing are they --- how amazing are they really?Not as amazing as you think.A great new book “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day” by David J. Hand tackles the math behind “improbable events” and even supposedly “impossible” events.Let me give you some examples from our casino gambling world: A self-proclaimed dice controller (no not me) learns the skill from a class he took and for several trips to the casino, after practicing for several weeks, he wins --- session after session for several days. He has never won more than one trip in a row in his life. That streak must prove he has dice control ability, right? No, not really. Pure chance has wild swings in fortune for casino gamblers.A blackjack player comes upon the simplest card counting method of all time; he studies goes to the casino and loses session after session --- about 10 in a row. The card counting system must not work. No, not really. Pure chance has wild swings in fortune for casino gamblers.I can go on and on. Wild streaks; wild wins and wild losses occur in casinos; they occur all the time. Why is that so? This book will explain it all.Are there advantage players in craps and blackjack (and video poker and poker and Pai Gow Poker)? Yes. But the proof of the pudding is not a few wild streaks even if those streaks are seemingly mind-boggling. To establish advantage takes far more proof than just “improbable” events occurring.I think readers on this web site will enjoy the book and if you aren’t schooled in improbability theory the book will open your eyes.Is the book so mathematically difficult that the average reader such as me will be at a loss to understand it? No. Author David Hand has been able to make the concepts in the book totally understandable.If you are interested in the improbable (or gambling) I think this book will speak to you.Frank Scoblete author of "I Am a Card Counter: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Blackjack"

Thank you, Dr. Hand, for taking a subject about which I understood zilch and making it easy to learn. I enjoy trying to understand the world around me, and this book helped me do that.Hand rattles off the names of a ton of principles and rules (too many in my view), but still I was able to take away some of the over-arching themes for which I think he was going: that our intuition is often wrong; that our inability to understand the basics of risk, chance and probability sometimes lead us to make bad choices because we under-estimate the risks of some things and over-estimate the likelihood of others.As Hand points out, this might not have far-reaching consequences when deciding whether to spend a few bucks buying a lottery ticket. But our inability to grasp basic statistics can have life-changing consequences: whether to have a second medical test performed before plunging forward with serious treatment or whether a jury convicts someone.This was a very interesting read. If this is "statistics for dummies," as some reviewers here have derisively called it, then I'm a dummy who is a little less dumb after reading the book!

Besides just an overall understanding of mathematical probabilities this book will help apply that understanding to daily life with numerous examples. There are also references to many other great thinkers and concepts which can lead to further research and understanding. It is well researched and thought out. The organization makes sense. The book manages to never be boring despite being about a math topic. It's dumbed-down enough to appeal to a wide audience but has enough smarts in it to keep intellectuals interested as well.It helps explain things like why you might run into 6 people you know in a foreign country within a 30 minute time period, which is something that actually happened to my friend, and I recommended this book to him

Very interesting read. What I love about it is that it's a great read for someone who's not keen of math and someone who's a math nerd. Anyone will love this book if they are curious. It offers some very interesting insight into why seemingly uncommon events are actually all too common. At the very least it'll fill you with some fun facts to share with friends, but it could change your view on how a lot of things work.

Clearly written, very accessible account of what should really be considered crucial basic information for understanding the world, i.e., why many improbable-seeming events are in fact not terribly unlikely and may even be inevitable -- as well as why you can pretty much forget certain future possibilities because you're so unlikely to see them that they are effectively impossible.I have a couple of minor beefs, one of them probably overly pedantic and the other one perhaps more substantive. The first is that, for a guy who's trying to introduce some intellectual rigor into our day-to-day analysis of what's going on, he's a little bit loose with his language sometimes. Possibly the most egregious example is that he uses the Law of Selection in two completely different ways. This law is introduced as a kind of hindsight bias, where we remember everything that fits our theory and conveniently forget things that contradict it. For example: "it always rains when I forget my umbrella" is based on only the times when it rained and you forgot your umbrella, ignoring all the times you either didn't forget your umbrella or it didn't rain. It is a retroactive and psychological law, a subjective failure in looking back at history. Then suddenly he uses the same phrase, the Law of Selection to apply to phenomena like Darwin's natural selection, which is a forward-looking, future-determining practice. Both are real phenomena, but it seems to me different concepts ought to have different names, otherwise we begin to lose faith in his precision, which strikes me as important in this subject area.Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, while he gives us plenty of reasons why things like hindsight bias and the law of selection tend to make us think things are stranger than they are, I'd have appreciated a little bit more thought on when statistical explanations do not actually suffice, and how to tell when they explain things and when they don't. To be fair, he does address this issue to a certain extent, I'm only saying I'd like more of it, and there are times his arguments beg for a bit more of it. For example, he argues that while it may seem that the attacks of September 11 should have been predicted, since there were plentiful warning signs, actually that's not fair because there are so many warning signs of all kinds at all times that it is only retrospectively that any kind of pattern could really be discerned. My problem with that -- apart from the questions it raises about the general utility of intelligence services -- is that his explanation fails entirely to deal with the question of the quality of the warning signs received. Possibly he is just trying to keep things simple, and maybe that's fair enough. However, if you're going to pick an example like that, you've got to do it justice. Numerous warning signs about 9/11 were reportedly rather specific about the nature, timing, and location of the attacks. Now, unless there were a similar number of similarly specific warnings about other types of attacks and their targets, then saying the attacks should have been anticipated (and prevented) is not mere 20/20 hindsight. His essential and simple point remains valid, but there was a missed opportunity here to take the analysis to a higher and more useful level.Anyway, these are minor quibbles and specific to my own biases, and overall this book serves as an excellent introduction to some essential concepts about statistics and probabilities that help make sense of the world. And, incidentally, acknowledging that an occurrence did not qualify as a miracle does not have to take the magic out of life -- if you win the lottery, I think you can still feel a bit lucky even though you know the odds favored somebody winning it eventually.

There were interesting nuggets in this book but I was left with an uneasy feeling that at the end I didn't understand what is the Principle of improbability nor what some of the various Laws actually stated.So far as the main principle is concerned, does it actually say anything more than that some things are less improbable than they seem at first sight? This pales into insignificance compared with a principle such as the Uncertainty Principle.The Laws are quite a rag bag. The Laws of Large Numbers and of Truly Large Numbers gave real insights derived from his expertise in probability, though a more thorough discussion, of why truly large numbers may be smaller than large numbers, would have helped. On the other hand the Law of Selection seems to be just a heuristic for weeding out false claims. Its relationship to Darwinian Natural Selection is tenuous; and his first example, explaining why some hypothetical insects migrate in response to a changing climate, is not an example of evolution at all.Actually, I thought he was a bit short of material, and his subject does not justify a whole book. As a whole, it is a bit lightweight. But if you don't expect too much, it is a good read.

The odds of winning the UK lottery are 14 million to 1 ... yet it happens every week.Excellent book, very accessible. I read it twice, the second time to try to remember the multiple examples used to illustrate the various principles (the laws of very large numbers, the laws of selection etc). I am very familiar with statistics, but I think this is written in a way that allows most people to understand what is being discussed. I especially liked (and could definitely relate to) the dangers associated with trying to explain relationships in data, rather than starting with a theory and testing it against the data. Thoroughly reccommend this book.

This book will 'do yer 'ed in' - but in the best possible way. I feel it has been written with both the academic professional and the layman in mind. Being a very definite layman I struggled at times to grasp at first some of the ideas and principles involved. But at the end felt that I had an understanding of why my toast lands butter side down, and other such improbably coincidences. Well worth both the money to buy it and the effort to read it.

Another book on this subject which I enjoyed.it was at times a little dryer and more work than some of the books I've read on this subject. It was still informative and interesting.

Lots of great ideas but terrible writing style. Repetitve at times could easily be 50 pages and cover the same topics. Painful reading experience.

Really good read with lots of interesting details.

Love this book so much in exploring probability and how your assumptions and initial thoughts can be challenged. Recommend highly! Covers many interesting concepts.

Easy to read, to understand and very enjoyable.

Math doesn't scare me at all. But, I know many, many people who blanche at the idea of even simple formulas. So, discussing subjects that rely on math without using math is a common problem, one that many have tackled over the years, but that few have succeeded at well. Even worse, when a subject is something like statistics or probability that almost requires math to explain it properly! While this isn't a book on statistics, per se, it is about probabilities and why some things happen, and others don't, despite what perceived "odds" should be. And this book manages to convey this information without delving into the math that would make it so simple to explain to someone who loves math, yet doesn't talk down to those people who have no issues understanding math, but also manages to keep the subject interesting and informative. It's a very tender balancing act that few writers have managed to achieve. David Hand keeps that balance throughout this book, and as such it is a remarkably achievement both in terms of his writing, but also the information he passes on.I bought this book based on a review in a magazine, thinking it would be too lightweight for me, but it would be a good, quick read that I could then pass on to others in my family who have not got the same comfort with math I have. I didn't expect to "learn" very much, simply see how the author approached the subject of probability and hope it was good enough to explain to my mother why she doesn't win the lottery every week (but having a ticket was better than not), explain to my brother why the seemingly impossible coincidences were actually not as improbably as he thought, and explain to my wife why two dice rolls at the craps table are likely to be certain numbers more than others. I didn't really expect more than a high-level, simple explanation of all these subjects, but I expected to be left wanting more. I was wrong.Without repeating all the comments made in the description and other reviewers' observations, it is hard to talk about this book without coming across as a giddy schoolboy. Hand's writing style is entertaining and easy to read. He has taken a subject that is difficult to explain and explained it remarkably well, without using a single formula in the process (but there are some graphs!). He covers a lot of material, a little at a time, venturing into the areas most people will find familiar, and explaining why the "impossible" isn't! The tone throughout is light, friendly, and never reaches the stage of "I know much more than you and I will try to explain this to you in very simple terms" that some other books degenerate into. In fact, even though I know statistics and probability theory very well (graduate school math!) I found some interesting bits of information in here I either forget or never knew.Probability isn't that difficult, of course, but what is difficult is explaining it to others without resorting to math. This book does it, very well, and should be on everyone's shelf if you are interested in knowing why things happen as often (or not as often) as you would expect. Hand does bounce around a bit from chapter to chapter, and his first-person writing style may not be what some people would prefer, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and refreshing my mind on stuff I haven't thought about since my University days. So, lemme see....entertaining, and informative. Just about the perfect description of a book, wouldn't you say? If the subject matter is of interest to you, you won't find another book on this subject that is as good, unless you're willing to get into formulae!

Have you ever thought that how our prayers to the god work.How God do miracles.This explains them all not like any priests aur or so called "babas" but mathematically.This book has changed my perception to many things.This book is must read.

Reading this book won't help you to strike on lottery ticket in anyway or any kind, but certainly a better insight on coincidences, the sense of miracles – in the scientific way.Well, I could perhaps further squeezed and simplified everything into one line of words; that is, "From time to time s***s will happened, right in front of you. So let's just move on" :)

I really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, the style of the writer makes it very easy to read and understand, and secondly it provided me, a person of limited statistics knowledge, with a whole new view of statistics as applied to many situations that I had not thought about before, for example the trial of the poor mother charged with murder for her two children who died from SIDS. I would recommend this book very highly.

To better help you to be a little more analytically rational and sensible...... and lots of fun. Very much worth the effort.

A good read.