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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

(Incerto #1)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Goodreads Author)

4.07 · Rating details · 50,089 ratings · 2,224 reviews

Just as coincidence can be confused with causality, so the lucky idiot can be confused with the skilled investor. The realities of randomness and probability almost guarantee that, out of a large pool of random investors, a Warren Buffett will emerge just by luck. Taleb (the founder of Empirica L.L.

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Hardcover, 277 pages

Published April 16th 2004 by Texere Publishing (first published 2001)

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Nov 18, 2008 Trevor rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, behavioural-economics, social-theory, economics

Yeah, you see. I’ve just checked and most of the other reviews of this book do pretty much what I thought they would do. They complain about the tone. This guy is never going to win an award for modesty and he probably thinks you are stupid and have wasted your life. And it gets worse – like that quote from Oscar Wilde that has tormented me for years: “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do”, this guy reckons that if you work for more than an hour or so per day you are probab ...more

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Sep 03, 2007 Steve rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Renowned statistician George Box once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The author of Fooled by Randomness is all over the first part of this statement, but apparently doesn’t consider it part of his job as an iconoclast to say anything about the second. Taleb goes to great lengths to point out how some of the original assumptions made in investments and finance have blown up in people’s faces. Yes, unusual events do happen more often than a normal distribution suggests. Yes, re Renowned statistician George Box once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The author of Fooled by Randomness is all over the first part of this statement, but apparently doesn’t consider it part of his job as an iconoclast to say anything about the second. Taleb goes to great lengths to point out how some of the original assumptions made in investments and finance have blown up in people’s faces. Yes, unusual events do happen more often than a normal distribution suggests. Yes, relationships among securities can change in meltdown scenarios. And yes, people are regularly fooled into thinking luck is skill. However, some market participants are clear-sighted enough to see those shrouded risks for what they are and make better assumptions about how they should be traded off against expected returns. These more enlightened investors don’t get the print, though, since they’re not the straw men Taleb can knock down.

Don’t get me wrong. We all like debunking stodgy, established wisdom when we see the holes. If you’re like Taleb, though, and see only holes, what you’re left with is nothing. What might there be in its place? Some models, when tweaked, are still useful.

In a brief moment of modesty, Taleb confesses to psychological weaknesses that can lead him to mistake noise for signal. He seems rather smug about it all, though. It’s like he figures his ability to recognize himself as a fool puts him on a higher plane. For the most part, his ego is openly displayed. It’s also coupled with an axe to grind – an aggressive combination. His fund has consistently underperformed (though he would counter that he’s positioned just right for the coming holocaust). His investment strategy boils down to buying lots and lots of insurance contracts against rare occurrences that he thinks will be slightly less rare. (In actuality, he buys stock options, but the insurance metaphor illustrates the point.) The problem is he’s so firm in his belief that the insurance companies have underestimated risks that he thinks all premiums are too low. However, those selling options, armed with models that account for rare events appropriately, will charge more than enough to cover those risks.

Who will be fortune’s fool? Time will tell, but a provocateur like Taleb will in all probability be better known for his quasi-epistemological exposition on unanticipated variability than for any true investment success.
...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Marvin chester rated it did not like it · review of another edition

You can't learn anything from this book; it's just a rant. The author's message is an incessant din of, 'I'm smart. They're stupid'

"trading rooms were populated by people ..devoid of any introspection, flat as a pancake..." p28

"these scientists ... devoid of the smallest bit of practical intelligence" p 30

The author likes the word 'devoid'.

"I was saved from the conversation of MBAs."

"but i could not conceal my disrespect ... as he could not make out the nature of my conversation" p.31

"a journal ...more

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Sep 14, 2011 Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: r-r-rs

The modern world regards business cycles much as the ancient Egyptians regarded the overflowing of the Nile. The phenomenon recurs at intervals, it is of great importance to everyone, and natural causes of it are not in sight.

~ John Bates Clark, 1898

Yeah, right!

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2001

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Dec 31, 2008 Philip rated it liked it · review of another edition

I love the theses that he has in the book, but jesus christ, this is horribly written.

I think the powerful ideas could have been condensed down to a New Yorker length article:
1. We tend to see the "survivors"; by hiding those who have failed, our understanding of many systems is skewed.
2. Leveraged betting on conventional wisdom provides consistent returns in the short run, but can explode when something weird happens (his "black swan idea").
3. You can reproduce the results of many systems by s ...more

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Jul 19, 2011 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: business-management-pm, thinking, 21st-century, society

I'm not certain if it was this book I read or Black Swan by the same author. Importantly I was not convinced by the blurbs or the reviews that there is any great significance in which one, if any, of these two books you may read.

It is one of those books with an interesting premise that grows steadily less interesting as you read. And as I read I had the growing feeling that the book could have been conveniently summarised in a dozen and a half bullet points with a few anecdotes tacked on for amu I'm not certain if it was this book I read or Black Swan by the same author. Importantly I was not convinced by the blurbs or the reviews that there is any great significance in which one, if any, of these two books you may read.

It is one of those books with an interesting premise that grows steadily less interesting as you read. And as I read I had the growing feeling that the book could have been conveniently summarised in a dozen and a half bullet points with a few anecdotes tacked on for amusement. This naturally led me to resent both the time I spent reading it and the author for stretching a good magazine article into book length.

What the author has to say is interesting (view spoiler) and it has to be said that skill is required to repeat your ideas repetitively in repetition and to repeatedly stretch repetitively those repeated ideas that would have been enough for a ten or fifteen page article repetitively over three hundred plus pages of repetition. Having said that I did have a warm feeling of Schadenfreude at the plight of the broker who lost everything and was last seen in his string vest smoking a cigarette to death as his few unreprocessed chattels were loaded on to the back of a very small van.

The notion of the black swan sums up his argument ie until Europeans arrived in Australia none of them had any idea that there was such a thing as a black swan. In the same way in the markets, or more generally in any activity, you can't calculate the risk or probability of an event if it's never happened - or as in the case of a black swan, if you can't even conceive of the very possibility of the event, the kind of things famously described by Donald Rumsfeld as the 'unknown unknowns'.

Reading one gets the impression that Taleb is modestly impressed by his own brilliance, one could well believe that he talks about himself in the third person like Caesar in Asterix, and that he is something of what might be technically described as an arsehole.

Borrow don't buy. Even better - borrow the Reader's Digest version. ...more

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Sep 29, 2010 Greg Linster rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Using his trademark aphoristic bent, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Arrogance in persons of merit affronts us more than arrogance in those without merit: merit itself is an affront”. I’ve come to realize that some people find Nassim Taleb’s arrogance quite repugnant, but, personally, I find it rather charming. I suspect that the same people who find Taleb’s arrogance off-putting are the people who wish they possessed a shred of his erudition. Nietzsche was certainly on to something; it’s hard to av ...more

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Jul 24, 2011 Tara rated it it was ok · review of another edition

One of my business school professors raved about this book. I expected to get an entertaining and informative investment professional's take on how our irrational tendencies keep us from applying basic probabilities that would help us make better decisions.

Instead, this book read like a pretentious, ranting diary. In the introduction, the author brags that he ignored nearly all of the suggested changes his book editors made (he labels book editors along with journalists, MBAs, and most social sc ...more

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Nov 28, 2014 Perry rated it liked it · review of another edition

Don't Be Fooled

The author is a Legend in his Own Mind, and he reminds the reader of his brilliance every few pages.

I'd rather have a waxen image of me stuck repeatedly in my tiny black eyes with voodoo pins than read another book by this man. ...more

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Sep 16, 2018 ScienceOfSuccess rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: waiting, 2020-reread, 2x, trading

This is the first book of INCERTO, the most polite, the simplest, and the best to start. I feel like I should read the remaining four(at least for now) again, and I'd love to.

Nassim uses a great analogy, so simple that child can understand, and explain a quite complex problem with statistics. He also makes some laugh at people that use statistics but can't understand it, this makes this book even more readable. The best part is - there is no ghostwriter or editor, all the thoughts are said by th ...more

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Nov 28, 2013 Sarah Clement rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: skeptics-book-club

This book is a lot of painful reading for little reward, as there was nothing truly remarkable or revelatory about Taleb's insights. Most of what can be said of this book has already been said by other reviewers on GoodReads, so I will just briefly recap here: he is incredibly unlikeable, and infuses the book with anecdote and a general disdain for most of humanity, while exemplifying many of the characteristics he rails against. His insights will not be news to anyone who has read even a little This book is a lot of painful reading for little reward, as there was nothing truly remarkable or revelatory about Taleb's insights. Most of what can be said of this book has already been said by other reviewers on GoodReads, so I will just briefly recap here: he is incredibly unlikeable, and infuses the book with anecdote and a general disdain for most of humanity, while exemplifying many of the characteristics he rails against. His insights will not be news to anyone who has read even a little bit about statistics, decision making under uncertainty, and behavioural economics. Part II is markedly better than Part I because he finally delves into what I (foolishly?) thought that the book was supposed to be about, but you have to make it through 130 pages of arrogance and badly composed narrative. Part II would have been pretty good if I hadn't read a lot of other books on the topics, and for those who are interested in economic markets, I think this would interest you if you can move past the constant interjections of Taleb's personal philosophy. Personally, my eyes glaze over when I read about trading, and I much prefer books like The Drunkard's Walk, which illustrates many of the same (but also many more) concepts. I was happy to read the section on Tversky and Kahneman, but I find their work infinitely more interesting and readable than his summary, and you are spared the normative commentary. Ironic for a man who criticises the normative dimensions of economics, Taleb certainly pushes a strong view of the world. When Taleb does delve into intriguing concepts, I was frustrated with the fact that he explained them poorly and incompletely, and quickly moved on to another topic. Much of the anecdote in the book could have been removed to make way for the real substance of the book. I don't really disagree with his criticisms of MBAs, economists, traders, journalists, etc., but I also don't think anything he says is especially revealing of insightful for most of us who aren't involved in the trading world. All in all, I am really puzzled by the popularity of this book, and I would strongly recommend against bothering with this one. If you're really interested in randomness, I would recommend The Drunkard's Walk. ...more

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Dec 08, 2008 Carolyn Stein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: everyone. The concepts in this book are invaluable for those developing critical thinking skills.

Shelves: economics

This is the best book I have read all year, closely followed by his other book, The Black Swan. Fooled by Randomness is one of that select group of books that changes your mind entirely. Once I read it I could never look at the world the same again, nor could I take my old assumptions for granted.

We are so accustomed to looking at the world and seeing patterns that we do not always understand that we may be seeing randomness and imposing a pattern where none belongs. Taleb talks about the variou ...more

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Aug 25, 2007 Nicholas rated it liked it · review of another edition

"Expect the unexpected" -- an aphorism that almost completely summarises the book. Cliches exist for a reason, but 196 pages later I feel the point has been well made.

Taleb is a stock market trader. As a trader, he believes that there is no way in general to predict the stock market -- that there are so many variables that the resulting stock price is indistinguishable from pure noise. Unfortunately, his profession is filled with people who believe that they *can* predict the market. In fact, so "Expect the unexpected" -- an aphorism that almost completely summarises the book. Cliches exist for a reason, but 196 pages later I feel the point has been well made.

Taleb is a stock market trader. As a trader, he believes that there is no way in general to predict the stock market -- that there are so many variables that the resulting stock price is indistinguishable from pure noise. Unfortunately, his profession is filled with people who believe that they *can* predict the market. In fact, some of these people trade very successfully for a while. Taleb belives that no trader can stay ahead of the market forever. The success of a small number of traders for a short amount of time can simply be explained by statistics: after all, given a large enough group of traders, some are bound to be successful some of the time even if their trades are entirely random.

This point is well illustrated with many examples, and this is where the book falters for me. Some of the examples are great (he goes into a lot of detail about various Monte Carlo simulations he has constructed), but some just seem like strawmen (he goes to a lot of trouble to describe the fancy cars, extravagant house, impulsive trading strategy, and hubris of a hypothetical trader, setting him up for his inevitable fall at the hands of the "unexpected rare event").

Some examples are just plain wrong, or at least misleading. For example, he goes into detail describing the work of Karl Popper, a philosopher who was interested in the question "how do you tell the difference between science and non-science?" Popper proposed several theories of science to answer this question.

The first, naive falsificationism, essentially states two things: firstly, that a theory is scientific if it can be falsified; and secondly, that a theory which has been falsified should no longer be used.

The second, sophisticated falsificationism, was a response to both the negativity of naive falsificationism and also a response to the criticism that science doesn't work that way (by immediately discarding theories the moment they contradict any evidence). Sophisticated falsificationism again states two things: that a theory is scientific if it leads to the discovery of novel (ie, new) facts; and that a theory is falsified by a new theory if the new theory can accurately predict everything the old theory could but *also* can accurately predict novel facts. General relativity is the canonical example of this: it incorporates Newtonian mechanics at low speeds but also explains things that Newtonian mechanics cannot at near-light speeds.

Anyway, Taleb's summary of all of this was "Popper's detractors called him a naive falsificationist." They did not, or at least not disparagingly, because Popper himself proposed the term, and labeled himself accordingly! I can understand why Taleb might not have wanted to include a huge explicative paragraph on Popper, but the book would have been just fine without the dubious example.

Another example of sloppiness occurs later, when Taleb talks about the QWERTY keyboard layout as an example of "the vicious dynamics of winning and losing in an economy" and repeats the old saw that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow typists down, and that it succeeded anyway because of a "snowball effect" of popularity. This claim is highly contentious (in fact one way to both speed typists up and prevent mechanical key jams is to put commonly-used letter combinations on opposite sides of the keyboard, something that QWERTY does to some extent but that Dvorak does much better), and once again the book would have been just fine without it.

Taleb is best when he is covering his area of expertise -- probability -- and the chapters dealing with probability are great. There are also several enjoyable and illustrative personal anecdotes which are a fun and memorable read.

Overall I enjoyed the book. I just wish he'd put more thought into his examples. ...more

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Aug 12, 2018 Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-of-2018

Again, I'm astounded by the quality of Taleb's writing. His theory is both scientific and poetic, his insights are always useful and reflect what I often experience in my life...the one thing that really impressed me in this book, however, was his ability to tell a great story. That's something I had forgotten about.

Before I can truly judge this book, however, I do think I need to read it a second time. Taleb always has sharp provocative ideas, but they do need to be reflected on and digested. ...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Santhosh rated it it was ok · review of another edition

The author says right at the beginning in his 20+ page preface that the book is intentionally left unstructured so that it may resemble the flow of his thoughts as and when they popped up. And that I believe is the problem. He seems to go around in circles repeating his ideas and thoughts, coming back to the same points, pulling in unrelated anecdotes while already inside one, leaving thoughts hanging without any form of closure, and generally ensuring you end up doing exactly what he says you s ...more

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Mar 02, 2009 Gordon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is a book by a trader with an intellectual streak -- although he might say he’s an intellectual with a trading streak. Nassim Taleb's book is highly idiosyncratic and personal, which is both what lends it a lot of its interest and what occasionally makes it irritating. Overall, he does not seem like a likeable man, and in fact is probably proud of that fact. But, it does get kind of tiresome to be told for the 5th or 10th time how unimpressed by wealth he is. In fact, he is clearly impresse This is a book by a trader with an intellectual streak -- although he might say he’s an intellectual with a trading streak. Nassim Taleb's book is highly idiosyncratic and personal, which is both what lends it a lot of its interest and what occasionally makes it irritating. Overall, he does not seem like a likeable man, and in fact is probably proud of that fact. But, it does get kind of tiresome to be told for the 5th or 10th time how unimpressed by wealth he is. In fact, he is clearly impressed by wealth, but counteracts it by stressing how little he works, how much time he devotes to intellectual pursuits and how much smarter he is than the typical wealthy person. But, all that’s just literary style -- and apparently a very popular one, judging by the sales of the book. It remains a fascinating book nonetheless.

Key ideas: We do not gauge causation, probability and risk very well, and hence we do not act according to a rational model of behavior, a la homo economicus. His heroes are Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, whom Taleb sees as the greatest thinkers in modern economics, since they re-wrote the book about how we actually decide as opposed to how economists and other rationalists think we ought to decide. Based on their work and that of a host of other researchers in behavioral economics/finance, he catalogs many of the systematic biases that strongly affect our behavior, such as:
o Hindsight bias: We fit the explanation to the events after the fact, as if we knew it at the time. And, we see patterns where there are none – or we see the wrong pattern. Mistrust the predictions of experts – they will almost always be trumped by an evidence-based analysis, since they tend to mis-remember the past. They remember their successes and forget their failures.
o Attribution bias: Beautiful people are more virtuous than ugly people. Tall people are more likely to be leaders than short people. A man in a suit is more trustworthy than a man in t-shirt and jeans. And so on.
o Small number bias: We extrapolate wildly from small samples.
o Asymmetric pain/pleasure from losses or gains: The pain of a loss is roughly twice as much as the pleasure from an equivalent-sized gain. So we sell our winners but keep our losers (to avoid having to feel the pain).

In short, life is more random than you think and your ability to navigate it rationally is more limited than you think.

What do I think of all this? He's right that it's a good idea to keep an open mind and to be ready to change your mind when you come up with a better interpretation and/or a more accurate set of facts. So far, so good. But his core world view is the product of the only profession he's ever known: Wall Street trading. As such, he does not shape let alone control events -- he simply bets on their outcome. That's not the kind of perspective that makes you see the world as a highly deterministic place, or one where, if you hope to survive long enough to get a few gray hairs, you can think of yourself as a "master of the universe" or even captain of your ship. He doesn't want to be captain of the ship; he just wants to bet on whether the ship will sink in the next storm or not, and turn a profit on the bet. ...more

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Feb 06, 2016 S.Ach rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Success of some people is nothing but pure luck. Some people get elated when the find some kind of pattern in randomness, when there is none. Probabilities are misconstrued as certainties. And thus people get fooled by randomness and create theories of success. - This is precisely the belief of Nassim Taleb who goes on and on and on and on to prove it throughout the book.

The tone of the book is dismissive and i-am-intelligent-you-are-stupid pedantic. The author lacks clearly the skills of provi ...more

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Jul 20, 2015 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it liked it · review of another edition

I've resisted reading Taleb for reasons he might approve of. I am suspicious of new gurus and of intellectual fads, especially when the word 'market' is factored in. I've finally read this book because a friend whose insights I give some weight to respects Taleb's ideas.

What I found is a witty, personable narrative about the dangers of pattern recognition, novelty addiction and overestimating our ability to be rational. Taleb draws on philosophy, mathematics, psychiatry and personal experience ...more

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Oct 08, 2013 Kai Schreiber rated it it was ok · review of another edition

A nice thesis (humans are unable to correctly assess risk and probability and therefore fall into all kinds of traps) wrapped in pompous and befuddled writing. At times the logic and flow is so jumpy and flawed that I thought there was something wrong with my copy.

There is something wrong almost constantly, but the biggest WTF moment came for me, when Taleb, who constantly reminds the reader that everybody else is a fool and it's just him who has insight and the tools to master probability, talk ...more

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Sep 18, 2014 Louis rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: math-stats, business

I assigned this to a class, with a warning that Taleb can be an insufferable, arrogant, jerk; but he was not going to be the last one they deal with so they have to get past that. But, from reading their reports, I think that it paid off. The attitude and tone he takes has a purpose, to deliver a message in three parts: we are not good at dealing with uncertainty, we don't think about uncertainty right because we tend to only see what actually happened instead of considering all the possibilitie ...more

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Dec 06, 2013 Yousif Al Zeera rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, favorites

Deep.

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Mar 31, 2012 Ralph Palm rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Interesting idea badly executed. So badly, in fact, I was left wondering who it was written for; it was neither coherent enough for an academic audience nor clear enough for a general one. The book is suffused with trivial errors of fact and usage, to the point where no statement (trivial or otherwise) retains any credibility. It is filled with the most glaring contradictions: the author will condemn an act on one page and commit it on the next, without any appreciable shred of self-awareness. T ...more

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Jan 30, 2009 Milan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, markets

A few insights from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

• People often mistake luck and randomness for skill and logic.
• Human brain was not built to make forecasts or think in probabilities.
• Just because it hasn’t happened before, doesn’t mean that it won’t happen any time.
• Emotions can overwhelm any capacity for rational thought.
• Reduce exposure to noise – newspapers, daily stock prices changes, television, etc.
• We are genetically poor at understanding the impact of rare events. ...more

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Jan 25, 2020 Brian Yahn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Taleb has quickly become one of my favorite writers, possibly my favorite thinker.

Rating his work is difficult. On one hand, I took away a few things from this book that I think will stay with me for the rest of my life and be very impactful. What more could a book possibly offer?!

On the other hand, this book has hardly any focus. I like to think of myself as pretty intelligent -- and I usually get bored quickly -- but even by my standards, Nassim changes topics too quickly. He will cover some t ...more

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Mar 30, 2018 Jaak Ennuste rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: best-ones

This book is written by a person who is both a thinker and a doer, a combination that should be strived for by everyone. Taleb is a successful trader who has read poetry, history, psychology and many other subjects quite extensively. The result is a book on how randomness guides our lives much more than we want to belive

The humble message is that we are all fooled by randomness, but few of us know it. Eventually the aim is not to become a cold, rational human calculator (it is simply impossible) ...more

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May 22, 2007 Tony Cohen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It has everything in a book that I yearn for....interesting ideas...some of which I don't grasp because hey are too clever for me...a smug narrator who seemingly knows more than everyone else...and a well-written and pleasing style.

Here is the crux of the book. Brokers have a very common weakness. They fail to appreciate that the likelihood of an event can not be the only factor one looks at when deciding to make a move. The likelihood, and the cos This is one of the best books I have ever read. It has everything in a book that I yearn for....interesting ideas...some of which I don't grasp because hey are too clever for me...a smug narrator who seemingly knows more than everyone else...and a well-written and pleasing style.

Here is the crux of the book. Brokers have a very common weakness. They fail to appreciate that the likelihood of an event can not be the only factor one looks at when deciding to make a move. The likelihood, and the cost of the mistake are both critical.

For example. If I told you that you could make $ 100 on every trade for 99/100 times, would you do it? The correct answer, depends on what happens on the other chance. When you are in a market, or some other experience where there are lots of repeated throws of the dice, the rare odd will happen, which is often when you hear of a trader 'blowing up'. When that happens, the greater and powerful "Master-of-the-Universe" disappears, and is banished forever...deemed a failure by his peers. What happened, is that he was unaware of the 'Black Swan', the title of another book by the same author.

In Europe in the middle ages, because all swans that had been seen were white, it had been postulated that ALL swans were white...a fallacy ultimately disproven when the contrary evidence was eventually found in Australia. In basic logical terms, the absence of B within a data set not proven to be the entire sum does not equal 'always A'.

So this 'Black Swan', the one throw out of 100 can and does happen. In the previous example, if you won all the previous 99 throws, you would have earned $9900. That sounds great, until you learn that loosing the final throw costs you $200,000. Knowing those odds, would you play the game? This basic fallacy, the lack of assessing the intensity of the randomness, is what dooms many people who sound well and truly brilliant...right until they blow up and are never heard from again.

Of course, there are other brilliant comments on the need to ignore useless and irrelevant noise, and train ourself to recognize that a random fluctuation is just that, and one should not search for a reason for mere statistical chatter, but the analogy of the black swan is the main crux of this wonderfully well-written book. ...more

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Aug 21, 2013 Phillip rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: unlikely-to-finish

The author continually pontificates that random events happen in life. But he neither uses actual events or statistics. He merely invents parables to expound on his points. He continues down this train of thought until he reaches the conclusion that the ultimate success and failure of some people can primarily be explained by luck. The author’s most famous exclamation is that the 40 years of investment success experienced by Warren Buffett, "may be by chance." He claims that with the number of i ...more

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May 11, 2020 Laura Noggle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020, nonfiction

One sentence review: Expect the unexpected.

Random book that runs the gamut. Taleb really can't miss a chance to slam Steven Pinker—he really can't stand him! Not quite as bad as the Pinker jabs in Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life however.

Amusing, entertaining, and interesting. My 4th Nassim Nicholas Taleb read, looking forward to finishing the Incerto Series with The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. I read them out of order, but they can each stand on their ...more

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Mar 28, 2016 Paul moved to LibraryThing rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Not what it purports to be, it's mostly autobiographical in nature. Some self-aggrandizement is fine given his job but the book is also full of cheap digs at his colleagues and since I don't really know the author or his friends it's all lost on me. The book starts out with a disclaimer that it will not attempt science or reason (research is hard!) because it's more about anecdotes and gut feelings and then continues to point and laugh at all those pseudo-science done by other traders.

The contem ...more

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Jul 13, 2020 Joel rated it did not like it · review of another edition

1/5 Stars⭐

"No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word."

You'll be fooled by this book!

Who named this book 'one of the smartest books of all time'! Maybe they were fooled by randomness. The author has overestimated the omnipotence of 'Randomness' in everything negating the value of planning and preparation. I went into this book seeking to be enlightened and came back out depressed. ...more

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Non Fiction Book ...: Fooled by Randomness (Mar 10-May 10, 2021)	3	15	Jan 19, 2021 03:58AM
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About Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a flaneur and researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability.  

Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human erro ...more

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Quotes from Fooled by Randomn...

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” — 163 likes

“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.” — 61 likes

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