Published: 2 Apr 2025
Last updated: 5 Apr 2025
Fooled By Randomness
- Release date: 2001
- Genre: Non-fiction, Business, Economics
- Themes/Moods: Medium-paced, Informative, Reflective
- Rating: 2.5/5
A walking contradiction of a book. There’s plenty of genuine insight,yet significant repetition and restating the “obvious”, Taleb himself is also “stereotypically” smart, coming off as intelligent but also brash and abrasive, while his writing style is punchy, no-nonsense yet frustratingly pretentious at times. Combined with the personal admission that Taleb is only human and he himself is “fooled by randomness” - one can only wonder whether this is acceptable defense or a begrudging admission that this whole book is written on as thin, shaky ground as all the other trader’s logic that Taleb frequently berates throughout - especially given the book itself is high on anecdotes yet rather low on hard data.
Despite that, there are some real nuggets of wisdom and interesting information, primarily around human psychology and the numerous biases it holds (again, sometimes pointing out the “obvious” but only in hindsight by virtue of it being written in plain English) but truthfully I found the few discussions on academic economist papers the most interesting, for example the ‘Lucas critique’ (assuming ‘rational’ humans, patterns in past data are always accounted for in the future) - poking holes and dissecting neoclassical economics’ folly, and highlighting alternatives such as ‘behavioural economics’ is always welcome, and I wished there was more of it here.
