"[Taleb is] Wall Street's principal dissident. . . . [Fooled By Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther's ninety-nine theses were to the Catholic Church."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New YorkerFinally in paperback, the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about the markets and the world.This book is about luck: more precisely how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill--the world of business--Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives.From the Trade Paperback edition.
El primero de los libros que le hicieron famoso, quizá por eso la proporción de cuñadismos se mantiene en límites tolerables. Buenas reflexiones sobre lo poco preparados que estamos para lidiar con la incertidumbre (la probabilidad es algo que no acabamos de comprender intuitivamente), mezcladas con numerosas anécdotas más o menos entretenidas. Un libro entretenido pero muy desordenado, hasta el punto que me estuve planteando dejarlo sin terminar.
Extremely readable, down to earth and informative. The plethora of negative reviews are from people who hate his personality. Nassim in someone interested in one thing--seeking truth. Those kinds of people are never conventionally likable; they're above all that bullshit. Socrates was put to death for being too fucking annoying, in a similar vein, if you can't get over his personality and look at the facts he's spewing you would've been one of the executioners xoxo bitches
Very good book and well worth a read. I love the combination of science background and good stories that help explain the matter. I wouldn't expect too much hard science background on randomness or probability theory, because the book is more an entertaining and story-telling kind of thing which can make you laugh and show interesting facts. Apart from that, I don't like the author's denunciation of Hegel and Marx without any valid arguments.
There's insight here, but Taleb doesn't put in the extra work to lay it out coherently, instead choosing to weave his own idiosyncratic narratives. I enjoy reading his contrarian rambles, but found it make accessing the philosophical points he makes all the more difficult. He definitely upped his written game by the time he wrote Antifragile.
I can't really call something written in this style an essay, it's more like propaganda, a call-to-arms. It's closer to the tone of some samizdat than to scientific articles.
And yet, it's about very real things summarized mostly in examples and short stories that makes the book itself lengthy though it could be shorted into a few points.
1) People judge observations from too little amount of samples. 2) People mistake noise to signal because of the urge to explain events. 3) People mistake luck to skill based on superstitions alone. 4) People tend to arbitrarily adjust their scales to measure values. 5) People tend to trust inductive thinking if it fits expectations.
Taleb doesn't offer real solutions, and he doesn't even say anything new to readers educated atleast with a basic level of mathematics (eg. combinatorics) or philosophy (eg. positivism) and yet his book is very recommendable because it's …
I can't really call something written in this style an essay, it's more like propaganda, a call-to-arms. It's closer to the tone of some samizdat than to scientific articles.
And yet, it's about very real things summarized mostly in examples and short stories that makes the book itself lengthy though it could be shorted into a few points.
1) People judge observations from too little amount of samples. 2) People mistake noise to signal because of the urge to explain events. 3) People mistake luck to skill based on superstitions alone. 4) People tend to arbitrarily adjust their scales to measure values. 5) People tend to trust inductive thinking if it fits expectations.
Taleb doesn't offer real solutions, and he doesn't even say anything new to readers educated atleast with a basic level of mathematics (eg. combinatorics) or philosophy (eg. positivism) and yet his book is very recommendable because it's like meditation on probability. While reading through the book, some of these ideas solidify on a reasonable level, it's also a subject that certainly needs paying attention to and worth reading or writing books about.
He mostly suggests ways to ignore people employing these fallacies too often, that certainly makes you feel better but could be doubtful if it helps anyone else. Despite the tone and strange closing thoughts it's an important read for everyone.
This book makes a few good points, sandwiched between a lot of elitism. The points I liked were
We are biologically predisposed to reproduction, and not really good at anything else, especially estimating and working with randomness. The 'old' story of send 50 people a letter saying GOOG will go down, and 50 people a letter saying GOOD will go up in the next week. Once that week has passed, take the 50 people you were correct about, and do the same thing for each half of that group. With each iteration you have a group where you've been right 100% of the time for how every many weeks you want. This 'proven track record' might sound convincing yet completely random.
