Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You - Self-Help Book for Personal Growth & Success Strategies - Perfect for Career Development, Life Motivation & Positive Thinking
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Product Description
"Written by true experts. Informative yet so much fun to read!" Nassim Nicholas Taleb author of The Black Swan "Easy-to-digest and highly competent. If everyone were to read this book, the world would become a more enlightened place." Gerd Gigerenzer author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconsious Uneasy with how chance determines a huge part of our lives, we try to control what cannot be controlled and predict what cannot be predicted. It’s a self-delusion that can have serious consequences for our personal finances, careers, happiness and health. Dance with Chance explains how we all fall foul of this Illusion of Control.” Fortunately, when we understand how luck operates, we can lessen its ill effects. By learning when to cede control over certain aspects of our life, paradoxically, we gain more control. By making small changes to our lifestyle, we can make a huge difference to the things that matter to us. From simple investment strategies to warning against health screenings, the authors offer revolutionary and often counterintuitive advice to make luck work for you. You’ll find out why millions of deaths are caused each year by medical negligence and why a billionaire is no happier than an Eskimo. You’ll discover why no-one predicted the worst financial crisis since the great depression and what makes a sports star. Updated to include the latest happenings in the credit crunch and informed by the latest findings in psychology and statistics, Dance with Chance is an essential guide to navigating the uncertain world in which we live. Spyros Makridakis is Distinguished Research Professor at INSEAD, Abu Dhabi Centre and a former Greek Olympian. Robin M. Hogarth is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. He was formerly a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
Customer Reviews
If you ever worked on time series prediction (forecasting), you should read Dance with Chance. It is written by a statistician, a psychologist and a decision scientist (Makriddakis, Hogarth and Gaba). As it is the case in The Numerati or Super Crunchers, authors explain complex notions to a non-expert audience. I find the book really interesting and provocative.The main concept of Dance with Chance is the "illusion of control". It is when you think you control a future event or situation, that is in fact mainly due to chance. This is the opposite of fatalism (when you think you have no control, although you have). The book teaches how to avoid being fooled by this illusion of control. This is a very interesting reading for any data miner, particularly involved with forecasting. The books contains dozens of examples of the limitation of forecasting techniques. For example, it explains the issues of forecasting the stock market and when predictions are due to chance. Authors use a brilliant mix of statistics and psychology to prove their point.Of course, it is difficult for someone in the field to completely agree with the authors. For example, they often state that no one can predict the future in advance. Formulated this way, one may agree. However, data mining and machine learning techniques are able to predict future situations (based on past data) to a certain extent (probabilities). Another bias of the authors is their tendency to reject complex models simply because...they are complex. Although I know the famous Occam's razor, advanced and complex techniques such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) have proven their efficiency in several applications. To conclude, whether you agree or not with the authors, Dance with Chance open your eyes on the illusion of control and thus on the limitations of predictive algorithms.
