What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives

Book Synopsis: “[A] delightful addition to the stuff-you-think-you-know-that’s-wrong genre, á la Freakonomics, Outliers, and The Black Swan.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were yelled at for doing poorly performed better. Evidence shows that highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent. Students who get the highest scores in third grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade. And yet, it’s wrong to conclude that screaming is an effective tool, that women choose men whose intelligence doesn’t intimidate them, or that schools are failing third graders. In fact, there’s one reason for each of these empirical facts—a statistical concept called “regression to the mean.”

Regression to the mean seeks to explain, with statistics, the role of luck in our day-to-day lives. An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more. It can make us see illness when we’re not sick and see cures when treatments are worthless. Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless.

Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counterintuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow identified a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to mistakes and irrational thought. Now, statistician and author of Standard Deviations Gary Smith shows—in clear, witty prose—how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives . . . and help us learn to rely less on random chance, and more on truth.