by Leonard Mlodinow
ISBN: 0307275175
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Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
balder1991 · 2025-09-19 · Original thread
I think the “secret explanation” can simply be things you don’t know (or that most people don’t know) because they’re not interesting per se, but when combined they make an interesting whole.

I enjoyed some books that don’t have anything unknown in its parts but that brought a lot of shift in perspectives for me, such as “Man’s Worldly Goods”[1] and “The Drunkard’s Walk”[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Worldly-Goods-Wealth-Nations/dp/... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives...

tertius · 2017-04-23 · Original thread
I believe what he was trying to say is that there is a large factor of chance involved with interviews.

Therefore it should not be a signal. Not getting a job because of an interview does not mean that you are not a qualified engineer.

It may mean that though. But it's not as if it's a 100m sprint where you can very easily measure results between Olympian and couch potato.

> https://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/d...