Fooled by Randomness

The first half was pretty heavy with statistical and economic legalese and so I had a little hard time following things around, maybe because it wasn’t meant for listening. But then the second half became much more enjoyable with all the practices and the anecdotes that the author shared.

The primary idea of this book is how people don’t understand randomness, they tend to find patterns in the most random of things and that’s until they’re faced with a black swan. He uses examples from his trading days when blokes in suits would try to “time” the market only to fail eventually.

His overt disdain for modern-day journalists—news aggregators really—was fun to listen to. He’s right for the most part and I’ve tried to quit the news (so far successfully) ever since I finished the book, at least digital news and it made no tangible difference in my life, contrary to what many of us believe, an experiment quite similar to when I soft-quit social media a couple of years back. There’s a lot of psychology being to referred here, mainly from Kahneman and Tversky, which again is profound and fun at the same time. Concepts such as Charlatanism, Endowment effect, Satisficing or Wittgenstein’s ruler are more nuanced when presented with real-life examples. This book does a rather good job of it. A good read.