Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Wild success is attributable to variance.” “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness… it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.” “Solon was wise enough to get the following point that which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). “Perhaps ridding ourselves of our humanity is not in the works we need wily tricks, not some grandiose moralizing help.” Frequently, these delusions are intentional and deserve to bear the name “charlatanism.”” “Ask a profitable investor to explain the reasons for his success he will offer some deep and convincing interpretation of the results. “Does the book industry suffer from the classical “expert problem” with the buildup of rules of thumb that do not have empirical validity? More than half a million readers later I am discovering that books are not written for book editors.” Assume that good qualities cause success based on that assumption, even though it seems intuitively correct to think so, the fact that every intelligent, hardworking, persevering person becomes successful does not imply that every successful person is necessarily an intelligent, hardworking, persevering person (it is remarkable how such a primitive logical fallacy- affirming the consequent- can be made by otherwise very intelligent people, a point I discuss in this edition as the “two systems of reasoning” problem). “Notice how our brain sometimes gets the arrow of causality backward.

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb