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

Amazon provides an interesting statistical commentary on this and all other products on its site: a graphic of the relative proportions of different star ratings assigned by customer reviews. If you flip this on its side it looks a lot more like what it is: a statistical representation of customers' views of the book.

So I have learned something from this (or Mlodinow's) book.

So a real vegemite, love-him-or-hate-him sort of writer. {{br|Fooled By Randomness}} is, if anything, *more* bombastic, and its content less interesting. Its first half comprises mainly dubious anecdotes about unnamed colleagues , and Taleb’s repeated efforts to persuade you what a voracious reader he is. (Interestingly in {{br|the Black Swan}} he places much store in his *anti-library* - the books he has ''not'' read). Taleb's early observations about [[probability]] are pat, under-explained and have been more thoroughly and less idiosyncratically expounded by others (such as {{author|Leonard Mlodinow}}’s {{br|The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives}}).

Two paragraphs later, in his next anecdote, Taleb rails against the stupidity of a man who derives conclusions from a single observation.

There is a seam of useful information in the second half of this book, but you must wade through quite a lot of self-aggrandisement to find it, and none is unique: as mentioned, there are better presented and less irritating accounts of the same information elsewhere, so Mr. Taleb may be disappointed to see yet another equivocal assessment of his book.