Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Fooled by Randomness is a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that is part of his well-known Incerto series. It is the word-of-mouth phenomenon that will transform your perspective on business and the whole wide world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the seasoned trader, recognized risk expert, polymath scholar, eloquent storyteller, and New York Times best-selling writer of The Black Swan, has created a timeless classic that inverts our beliefs about luck and competence. This work of art is about luck, or more precisely, how we interpret and cope with luck in our personal and professional lives.

Best understood in the context of the most prominent arena in which luck is misunderstood for talent – the world of trade – Fooled by Randomness offers a riveting perspective into one of the least understood aspects of our life. The author addresses significant intellectual questions relating to the underestimation of the impact of luck on our lives using an engaging narrative style.

Some of the characters in the book have understood and realized, in their way, the importance of chance, probability, and luck: the baseball legend, Yogi Berra, the philosopher of knowledge and understanding, Karl Popper, the wisest man in the ancient world, Solon; the modern financier, George Soros, and the Greek explorer Odysseus.

However, the most iconic character, the fool who happens to be at the right spot at the right moment, stays anonymous; he exemplifies “survival of the least fit.”

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Black Swan is a book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s seminal Incerto series, an exploration of incoherence, chance, probability, uncertainty, human error, decision-making, and risk in a world we cannot fathom. The series also includes Fooled by Randomness, Skin in the Game, Antifragile, and The Bed of Procrustes.

A black swan is an incredibly unlikely event with three basic characteristics: It is unpredictable; it has a significant impact; and after the event, we devise a narrative that makes it look less arbitrary and much more predictable than it was. The astounding success of Google and 9/11 were both black swans.

According to Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlay nearly every aspect of our existence, from the creation of faiths to our personal experiences. Why do we only recognize the presence of black swans after the fact? As per Taleb, part of the issue is that people are built to study particular details when they should be concentrating on generalities.

We constantly fail to contemplate what we do not know because we are preoccupied with what we do know. We, therefore, are unable to accurately predict opportunities, too susceptible to the urge to simplify, explain, and categorize, and too receptive to honoring those who can envision the “impossible.”

Taleb has spent years researching how we deceive ourselves into believing we know more of it than we do. Big events continue to amaze us and influence our environment, whereas we limit our thoughts to insignificant ones. In this enlightening book, Taleb discusses what we know about what we don’t know, and the second edition includes a new empirical and philosophic essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which provides tools for navigating and exploiting a Black Swan world. The Black Swan is elegant, shocking, and ubiquitous in its applications; it will alter the way you perceive the world.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

This compilation of aphorisms and reflections by the writer of the masterpiece The Black Swan communicates his principal concepts in ways you would not anticipate.

The Bed of Procrustes derives its name from Greek mythology: the tale of a man who forced his guests to fit his bed to precision by stretching or chopping off their limbs. It symbolizes Taleb’s perspective on the vainglorious side effects of modern civilization: reconfiguring humans to fulfill technology, blaming the truth and reality for not being appropriate for economic models, conjuring up illnesses to sell drugs, defining intellect as what could be measured in a classroom, and convincing individuals that employment is not slave labor.

These snarky and caustic aphorisms will shock you by revealing self-delusions you haven’t ever acknowledged but have been living with.

Taleb shatters human illusions with a rare blend of incisive humor and profound wisdom, comparing the classical qualities of elegance, courage, and erudition with the modern maladies of philistinism, nerdiness, and phoniness.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the blockbuster writer of The Black Swan and one of the world’s preeminent philosophers, has written a book about how some systems benefit from disorder.

In The Black Swan, Taleb highlighted a dilemma; in Antifragile, he provides a comprehensive solution: how to profit from chaos and turmoil while avoiding fragility and bad outcomes. What he refers to as “antifragile” is one step above robust, as it gains from hardship, instability, and pressures, much as human bones become bigger and more powerful when subjected to tension and stress.

Taleb turns unpredictability on its head, arguing that it is desirable, and proposes that objects be designed to be antifragile. Highly ambitious and transdisciplinary, Antifragile gives a roadmap for how to behave and flourish in a world we do not comprehend and cannot even attempt to comprehend. Whoever, without antifragility, will perish. Why is the city-state superior to the nation-state, why is debt unhealthy, and why is nearly everything contemporary doomed to fail? This book examines innovation, health, biology, medicine, life choices, foreign policy, politics, war, urban planning, personal finances, and economic systems. The recipes and voice of ancient knowledge from Roman, Phoenician, Medieval, and Greek sources may be heard throughout.

Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

One of the most influential philosophers of our day epitomizes what it means to comprehend the world, thrive in a career, add value to a fair and just society, identify folly, and inspire others in his most challenging and pragmatic work to date. Nassim Nicholas Taleb demonstrates, using examples spanning from Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Hammurabi to Seneca, that the willingness to assume one’s risks is a fundamental characteristic of saints, heroes, and thriving people in all sorts of backgrounds.

Taleb challenges long-held ideas concerning the values of individuals who lead military actions, make capital investments, and preach religion. 

His insights include:

• For social justice, prioritize symmetry and risk distribution. You cannot benefit by transferring risk to others, as do banks and major organizations. You cannot get wealthy without taking responsibility for your risks and losses. This asymmetry can be corrected more effectively with skin in the game than with thousands of regulations and laws.
• Ethical guidelines are not universal. You belong to a greater group than yourself, yet it is still smaller than mankind as a whole.
• Minorities govern the world, not majorities. The world is not governed by consensus, but rather by obstinate minorities forcing their preferences and values on others.
• An intelligent person can nevertheless be an idiot. From low-carb diets to Iraq to Stalinism, “educated philistines” have been mistaken about everything.
• Avoid overly convoluted approaches (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell is superior to pricey modern devices for building muscle.
• True religion requires dedication, not simply faith. The amount of risk you are willing to take for something reveals how much you trust it.