Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets  
Author(s) Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Language English
Genre(s) Statistics, Philosophy, Finance
Publisher Random House
Publication date 2001
Pages 316
ISBN 0-8129-7521-9
OCLC Number 60349198
Dewey Decimal 123/.3 22
LC Classification HG4521 .T285 2005
Followed by The Black Swan

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is a book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the fallibility of human knowledge.

Contents

Reaction

The book was selected by Fortune as one of the 75 "Smartest Books of All Time."[1]

The book's name, Fooled by Randomness, has also become an idiom in English used to describe when someone sees a pattern where there is just random noise.

Thesis

Taleb sets forth the idea that modern humans are often unaware of the existence of randomness. They tend to explain random outcomes as non-random.

Human beings:

  1. overestimate causality, e.g., they see elephants in the clouds instead of understanding that they are in fact randomly shaped clouds that appear to our eyes as elephants (or something else);
  2. tend to view the world as more explainable than it really is. So they look for explanations even when there are none.

Other misperceptions of randomness that are discussed include:

Editions

In 2001, TEXERE published the first edition of the book. (ISBN 1-58799-071-7, London : Texere, 2001)
In 2004, TEXERE published a revamped second edition.
In 2005, Random House published a softback edition with more changes. (ISBN ISBN 1-58799-190-X, New York : Random house, 2005)
In 2005, a French version appeared, with many unique changes.
The book has been translated into 20 languages,[2] and is reported to have sold over half a million copies.
Further editions have been published by Penguin (softback, May 2007) and Random House (hardback, October 2008.)

See also

References

  1. ^ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/03/21/8254826/index.htm
  2. ^ fooled by randomness

External links