Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Hey! Hi what's up! ? Doing well, hoping so. This piece will help you a little bit please do read till the end. This book deals with the randomness around us and let us know and grow more everyday. Isn't it interesting that even our life is full randomness and uncertainties. Infact that is the only thing that makes our life interesting.

And the author of the book tries to relate the life with the stocks & investment which makes the book more resourceful to read. The author has published more than about forty-five journals and gives you all the reasons to go for this book. Go and just expand you knowledge in the world of trading.

Thank you. Hope this helps ???.

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One of the best book for self-help. The author, Taleb explained many times we facest such a situation, where we have to take the decision, but we can't understand, assume you want to invest in the market but sometimes market goes up and some time goes down. in such a situation you should think like Randomness, or irrational, and take a decision, We can not take all our decision with rationality, sometimes we have to take a decision with randomness, Here author further says, but what about the outcome, to know about its outcome you should read this book. It is really a very helpful book to understand, situation and takes a decision.

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Fooled by randomness published in 2007, became a word of  mouth bestseller and is published in 31 different languages, fortune wrote One of the smartest book of all time., financial times book of the year.

Everyone wants to succeed in life, but what causes some of us to be more successful than others?IS IT SKILL or strategy-or something all togather more unpredictable? like randomness, luck or chance. Fooled by randomness is based on basic truth about humans.

We are not very good at statistics, especially if we simply rely on our instincts, we fear sharks, airplanes, and  terrorists  yet we never think of mundane risks like cancer and car accidents which are more common than airplane crashes.same way we are not good at judging investments, we think that a broker or an MBA expert analyst can pick up wining stocks in a row, not necessary so, says Taleb.

This book is worth reading if you are willing ever to invest in individual stocks or active mutual funds with 5 star rating, this book will prevent you by doing so, and can save your hard earned money from massive loses caused by fooled by randomness of the market, as RANDOM means no body can predict which way market or a particular stock will move.

It is like a drunkard standing at the center of a football field, no body can predict which direction he will go in next second, but wall street brokers and MBA analysts will prove you that they can predict the future by looking at some technical analysis charts or fundamental data, because that is their bread and butter, as they live on your money in form of high commissions and brokerage charges, even financial media like investment magazines will keep on forcing you the top 10 hot stocks you must buy just now.

If someone is so sure why they will tell you and can not become rich themselves, as these fortune sellers are all trained salesman, who survive on selling you castle in the air, dreams, weather market goes up or down, these brokers and active fund managers keep on making more money while you will land in the poor house in old age. This book will remind you, how much controle you have on your own life and brain to make your own rational decisions instead of fooling by randomness of the market. Nassim  Nicholas Taleb has written other bestsellers as

The black swan and Anti fragile-how to live in a world we do not understand. this book must be read by every serious investor who really wants to understand how the stock-market works.but if you are looking for investing tips, or how to invest, this is not the place.

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This book was suggested to me by my friend.

This book implicitly rejects the idea of One Creator and explicitly explains that it's all luck and randomness of events and not some higher intellect. It also rejects the idea that Great Men have become Great by doing some thing very different/great. Taleb made the best effort to prove the above statement by picking up loads of examples related to financial trading, statistics, applied economics, and psychology at large.

A good read in short.

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"Fooled by Randomness" knocks the stuffing out of all self-serving generalisations about cause and effect that one tends to bring up to glorify oneself.

As the author argues convincingly, the real world is not so deterministic and often the 'success' one claims owing to one's 'skills' might be nothing more than a random result that may not be replicable by other 'similarly skilled' people and / or in similar situations. Verily, the author attributes such dubious successes to 'survivorship bias', a statistical phenomenon, whereby only the successful outcomes of a population (i.e. a whole lot) of occurrences are reckoned while the failures (which could actually outnumber the success  many times over) are excluded.

On the other hand, there is a tendency to ignore the probability of the rare event that could have gigantic implications - what the author refers to as the 'Black Swan' proposition. A must read for any and every discerning reader. On the other hand, there is the equally forecful trend of looking at the probability of number of outcomes without weighting them by the scale of their likely impact. This too has come out very wel in this book.A must read for discering readers whatever be their walk of life.

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(For the title, I evaluated options like ‘My tricks to get more clicks’, ‘That phase of my life when I read for the sake of writing reviews’ etc, but rejected them as they are long and rhyming. Thus I decided on this title, which is 'short'and rhyming, and cheesy too)*

Synopsis: ‘Fooled By Randomness’ is a critique of the tendency to seek patterns, in all that is inherently random. Life is random.

Introduction: Mind performs a unique function of structuring all the information that is fed into it. We are inherently uncomfortable with lack of reasoning, structure and definition (At least most of us are. It’s called fear of absurdity.) So we keep trying to devise methods to predict the future, keep observing trends (eg. Is MS really on a downhill wrt content? Has the number of ‘opinions on people’ escalated beyond the number of ‘reviews on products’? Please note that dictionary.com categorically states ‘opinion’ to be a completely different word from ‘review’. I have consciously not quoted the dictionary definitions of ‘Opinion’ & ‘Review’, lest I end up plagiarizing word to word from a website)

Elucidation: Now let me put it in a ‘Mouthvshuttish’ mode of argument.

If a historian and a researcher in far future (or even better, arriving from a different universe) analyses a lot of Indian internet content and news, and tries to derive a correlation between ‘RSS feed’ and 'Hindu Fundamentalism', then would he not have substantial evidence for his arguments? (I hope my argument isn’t similar, and that my punctuations, sentence length, and SOH content are ‘favorably balanced’. With so many bumbling examples in motion, writng reviews on MS is getting easier by the day)

Thus, 'Fooled By Randomness', in my opinion, is an attempt to make us slightly aware of the 'possible' mistakes that we may be making in assessing reality, and thus fooling ourselves. While probability may be the religion for all those who do not believe in God, this book doesn’t leave much for the believer to cling on to, except her own personal sense of right and wrong in a random world.

The Writer:Nassim Nicholas Taleb has spent the better part of his life trying *to tease people who take the quality of their knowledge too seriously.

(The previous line in italics sure exists on the net, but I have, honestly, typed every word of it. The author has mentioned the same in his book too. My mother tongue may include Hindi, English, Punjabi, Bhojpuri & SMS *par main Goo-gal nahin karda)

Reading a person with such a profound aim in life, has to be entertaining.

The Content:Most part of the book does contain examples from the field of stock market to prove the point. But it is not a guide to the stock market. A dentist’s profession is definitely less affected by randomness than a Trader’s, and the writer accepts it.

The book is like an encyclopedia of extremely interesting concepts like Reverse Turing test, Dada Engine, Monte Carlo Simulations.

The Black Swan, Pascal’s Wager (and many more) and the writer has also introduced concepts of his own, that are equally captivating, like ‘Wittgenstein’s Ruler’ and Solon’s Warning (NO, its not miss-spelt, has nothing to do with Colon and is NOT a reaction to any law of motion explained by a certain infamous Prof. Shakarotti. He is not a victim of Newton's IPR infringements)

The style of the author is light, admirable and displays the extent of rigor undertaken before making bold statements.

And yes, talking about being bold, the author goes to the extent of questioning the scientific process (that basically starts at Hypothesis and ends at a Theory) saying that “there exist only two types of theories, those that have been proven wrong, and those that are yet to be proven wrong.”

*Strongly recommended to those who enjoy the idea of randomness and probability. And recommended to others too.

PS.** Have you heard of “impairments in socialization, communication, and imagination, with stereotyped repetitive interests taking the place of creative play”. This is taken from mindship.com and refers to ‘autism’ in general. I feel MS is beyond it, and IF it isn’t, then it’s the MS’ians who are responsible and not the management.

Having said that, I think Mister CEO (who is the only person shown on the MS Management section) has a tough task ahead. He is playing in an era of online social revolutions and WEB2.0. I for one am keen on tracking the development of MS in the coming years to see what different can MS do to remain at the blue end of the ocean. Exciting times to formulate future ready brand strategies Faisal. ATB.

PPS. I have read almost 50% of reviews about MS on MS recently, and tracked a lot of heated discussions. I apologise for not mentioning all of them overtly, except the DOC, whose review impressed me the most in my last 3-4 years on MS (close contenders are dismantle brigade's full stop lessons and Girlnextstore & her malignant friend's pseudointellectual guide to chosing gifts for your girlfriends). I know this is unfortunate as MS is not about writing skills but product attributes. But who decides that? Food for thought Faisal!?

PPPS. I agree that this review deserved a place among the many “General Views On MS” section, but then I feel that defeats the purpose of MS. As explained, Opinions are different from Reviews, and I just felt I could convey a message even while writing a product review.

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