Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All my life I have suffered the conflict between my love of literature and poetry and my profound allergy to most teachers of literature and “critics.”

We are flawed beyond repair, at least for this environment—but it is only bad news for those utopians who believe in an idealized humankind. Current thinking presents the two following polarized visions of man, with little shades in between.

(There is a distinction, however, between the mind of a pure mathematician thriving on abstraction and that of a scientist consumed by curiosity. A mathematician is absorbed in what goes into his head while a scientist searches into what is outside of himself.)

I thus view people distributed across two polar categories: On one extreme, those who never accept the notion of randomness; on the other, those who are tortured by it.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise. The modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy wrote a piece in 1915 after Philostratus’ adage “For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen.”

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.

Modern times provide us with a depressing story. Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science.

My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

The central banker lowers interest rates, a recovery ensues, but we do not know whether he caused it or if he slowed it down. We can’t even know that he didn’t destabilize the economy by increasing the risk of future inflation. He can always fit a theoretical explanation, but economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively.

We are watching this happen now (December 2021).