Fooled by Randomness
I started listening to this audiobook as my economic book of the month or something. I’ve previously read Taleb’s Black Swan and felt that he was fairly good at selling his ideas and explaining them. In this book, Taleb basically puts forth the premise that there’s a ton of randomness in life (I’m sure that’s not hard to believe), and that a lot of folks success in life is due to that randomness (this is where some folks get contentious). its not to say hard work doesn’t factor into success but one of the best predictors of whether folks are going to be successful is to see who they are born to. And that is one of the most random events that you can’t work hard for.
For the most part, the book can be distilled into a few major ideas:
1) People don’t like to be told that they are successful due to luck. They prefer to see that they worked hard for their success. So if you are successful, be grateful for it and recognize that its probably more luck than anything else. 2) We can only do so much to remove the human emotions from decision making. We have automatic heuristics borne out of evolution and short circuiting those heuristics is probably impossible. Its best to be cognizant about their role in your decision making and perhaps having methods of dealing with it in highly leveraged situations (for example, don’t let yourself be fooled by emotions to buy/sell individual stocks, just buy index funds). 3) Journalism is an entertainment profession. There might be 1 or 2 that aren’t, but for the most part, journalists exists to entertain the mass public.
The rest of the book is him ranting on and off about various many different things. there are some interesting anecdotes such as when he brings in a russian chess player to interview all the MBAs who said they play chess. =)
The book is probably not realy worth the entirety of listening to it once you distill the core ideas, you can skip the rest of the book. the problem is its not easy to distill the ideas until you’ve finished the book.
I believe the audio version was self narrated so there is that. all in all, this is a 3.5* for me. I’ll round up because the book has some good ideas and makes great arguments for them, but also likes to go off on segues that don’t really add to the ideas within.