Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.

Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb–veteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur, and New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan–has written a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe about luck and skill.

This book is about luck–or more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of trading–Fooled by Randomness provides captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives. Writing in an entertaining narrative style, the author tackles major intellectual issues related to the underestimation of the influence of happenstance on our lives.

The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: the baseball legend Yogi Berra; the philosopher of knowledge Karl Popper; the ancient world’s wisest man, Solon; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Odysseus. We also meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his professional life but falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness.

However, the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed–the lucky fool who happens to be in the right place at the right time–he embodies the “survival of the least fit.” Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru’s insights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained by chance.

Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? It may be impossible to guard ourselves against the vagaries of the goddess Fortuna, but after reading Fooled by Randomness we can be a little better prepared.

Named by Fortune One of the Smartest Books of All Time

A Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year

Editorial Reviews

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"[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 Yorker

“Fascinating . . . Taleb will grab you.”
–Peter L. Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“Recalls the best of scientist/essayists like Richard Dawkins . . . and Stephen Jay Gould.”
–Michael Schrage, author of Serious Play

“We need a book like this . . . fun to read, refreshingly independent-minded.”
–Robert J. Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance

About the Author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent nearly two decades as a businessman and quantitative trader before becoming a full-time philosophical essayist and academic researcher in 2006. Although he spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity”—that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.

Taleb’s books have been published in thirty-three languages.

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Product details

Series: Incerto
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Updated edition (August 23, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 158799190X
ISBN-13: 978-1587991905
ASIN: 0812975219
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 756 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Business Statistics
- #18 in Statistics (Books)
- #10 in Free Will & Determinism Philosophy

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bob57

An act of hubris, committed to paper.

July 8, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I can tolerate the ego-maniacal writing style, but I cannot abide the enormous errors the author commits when he delves into science.
To wit: Taleb posits that Einstein proved Newton wrong. Not true. Einstein showed that Newtonian mechanics failed at the extremes - extremely large (cosmologic) and extremely small (atomic distances). Further, he posits that the poor schlep scientist's odds of success continue to increase as he does more mouse experiments. Untrue if the hypothesis under which the scientist is proceeding is ultimately incorrect. And finally, the author accepts global warming as a given and castigates science for not having recognized the truth of it from random weather events. Taleb, stick your knitting. It's one thing to be ignorant, but another to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

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Fools by design

August 31, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Bad news. You are a fool about to be fooled. Again. And again. Just like everybody else. We are a species of fools. What a circus! But Taleb is a special kind of fool, foolish enough to write an essay on how randomness fools us. Interesting fool, nay? The whole thing feels like a foolish attempt to make us better fools. Even his methodology writing this book is foolish. Speaking his mind and having fun. Fool, fOOl, FOOL! Outrageous even for a brave fool. If you don't take yourself too seriously (say a foolish fool), this book is damn entertaining. Otherwise, this book is very insulting for serious fools. Seems that our carbon-based machinery fails us dealing with the abstract tools (say probability theory) we have been developing to understand nature (say since Pythagoras; just to finish with a foolish guess). Enjoy, you fool.

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Alex Bush

Still the Best of Taleb

November 3, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Fooled by Randomness revolutionized how I view the world. In multiple ways. It's hard to overstate how rarely a book changes your ideas about how the world works once, let alone multiple times, and that Taleb has managed to weave a fantastically engaging and entertaining book out of what could very easily be a dry and technical topic is just icing in the cake.

I've read all four of Taleb's books and Fooled By Randomness still stands out as my favorite. Although Black Swan is still the most popular, and most controversial, Fooled in many ways is the most practical, as it's the most general and therefore most widely applicable. Everyone should deeply understand the survivorship and hindsight biases, as well as the difference between conditional and unconditional probability.

That being said, it's often hard to determine whether the heart of the book is the ideas (which to someone such as myself who has only a Stats 101 background in probability are almost always revelation-inducing) or the author. I can't stress how much I learned from this book that has nothing to do with probability or statistics, just random asides from an erudite and meandering mind. Regardless of your background (or even your interest in probability) you will probable learn some fascinating and/or useful tidbit from Fooled, and probably a whole lot more.

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Ferdinando Cortese

Nothing burger

September 18, 2019

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I have to confess that I stopped reading this book around page 130. The author says that many successes in investment may just be due to luck, that unexpected events can completely ruin a person, and that prudence in investing is a virtue. Fine. But this should take one paragraph not 130 pages. Yes, Talib quotes Solon, Descartes, Popper and all kind of philosophers. Yes he can speak 10 languages, he has a huge amount of knowledge. Still in this book, which seems to have been written in a hurry, he does not say anything of importance. Do not read it!

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Pretend PersonTop Contributor: Philosophy

Saeva Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

September 4, 2019

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

"Fortune, Cruel Empress of the World” - The ancients knew her ever so well. ‘Fooled by Fortuna’ is a viable alternative title for this book which would covey the author’s message which is just a reminder of the precarious position we occupy in the world of experience. Luck plays a pivotal role in winning and losing, victory and defeat, we simply choose not to acknowledge it and instead dream up false attributions to skill, leadership and aplomb. This about sums up the thesis of the book. Nothing new here, nothing original, just a description of experience and events, but something of which we need to be reminded of every so often. Examples show that some people are just lucky, others unlucky, how the attribution fallacy, inductive fallacy and the false precision fallacy arise; that success is relative, how coincidence is mistaken for cause, how the mirage of false pattern recognition is mistaken for genuine phenomena; that opinions and selections are full of bias and human knowledge is replete with asymmetries. It is we in the modern, or dare I say it, we of the post-modern world, that need to be reminded that much of our understanding and control over perceived reality is an illusion.

Commentary:

Financial theories and economic paradigms are not a matter of truth about reality, they are fictional narratives we tell ourselves about reality; the narratives are about how we navigate our experience of existence. However, it is from this basis that we proceed as if we understand reality and control events. This result is to be fooled by randomness. Economics is just a created construct to help us navigate the experience of a random existence and retrospectively explain random events. In a way, economic theory is a narrow band response to the conditions of existence, not a description of the underlying reality of existence. Such theories are not much different than religious beliefs, both are placebos; attempts to impose order and determinate explanations upon the indeterminate randomness of existence. Many of our explanatory theories employed to guide our experience of existence reduces to a cacophony of concatenated asymmetrical subjective approximations. We are victimized by Fate, tyrannized by Evolution and cursed by Genetics. Within the pages we read many examples of those subjected to the tyranny of goals and undone by the treachery of plans. Is it not Fate for whom of course we each wait? Yes, for Fortuna to spin once again her great wheel; it is likely she who invented the wheel.

Critical Comments:

The author rightly points out the silliness and fallaciousness of pseudo-scientific thinking and warns the reader against falling for it. He then proceeds to engage in his own form of pseudo-philosophical thinking with an ad hominem attack on Hegel. I wish that he would have chosen not to mar his otherwise interesting book with a low brow diatribe. Taleb understands Hegel as a “The Father of All Pseudo-thinkers”. Clearly, Taleb has not read Hegel in anything more than the most superficial manner. He fails to see the master dialectician and instead employs the advanced philosophical methodologies of taking quotes out of context, engaging in an overly simplistic reductions and from here, drawing false inferences. These are many of the fallacies that he warns the reader to avoid. The flaw in Taleb’s analysis is to consider a single statement, or perhaps even several individual statements by Hegel out of context and fail to consider Hegel as presenting a comprehensive system of thought as well as a challenge to comprehensive systems of thought, with its own unique internal consistency, the sum of which is greater than a single portion considered out of context and subjected to the parlor tricks conjured up with the misapplication of Mote Carlo simulations. In seems that Taleb is being fooled by his own noise. Maybe the title of the book should have been ‘Noise Pollution’.

Amusing, but Not as the Author Intended

Amusingly, Taleb anticipates and preemptively attacks reviews of this book appearing on Amazon, before they are posted by saying that such views say more about the reviewer than the book. That is, the reviews are preemptively dismissed as being self-reflexive This is also a borderline case of the ad hominem fallacy. Add to this the taint of ‘poising the well’ of reviews with his all too easy preemptive dismissal and as well ‘painting with the broad brush’ and putting all reviews in the same category, generating his own type of category error. The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks – how amusing.

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