Fooled by Randomness

As I told Gary the other day, I've rather eclectic taste in books. I've read books by Douglas Adams, who specialises in humourous nonsensical concoctions, to Thomas Friedman, who is a specialist in Middle East politics. Anyway, I'm currently reading something of a more serious, and yet also frivolous, nature. Its Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It's a book about luck disguised and perceived as skills, and more generally randonmess disguised and seen as determinism. I bought it as part of a 3-in-1 deal, comprising of 2 other books: Freakonomics and Blink, from Borders. Anyway, I've always wondered if successful people are successful because they are imbued with in-born abilities that they further honed when they were growing up. According to Taleb, success is more capricious than that and is so random that most people, short of those with an IQ of less than 100, have a shot of being successful. In fact, he says that most successful people are lucky fools who just benefit from a disproportionate share of luck, but they somehow attribute their success to some other, very precise, reason. Personally, this caused me to re-evaluate my long-held belief that I've exhauted my quota of luck when I was young. To cut a long story short, I squandered my luck winning contests with ridiculously cheap presents, such as colour pencils, erasers and other implements of the scholastic category.

But I digress. Taleb's point is this - we underestimate the share of randonmess in about everything. He said that even in society at large, we're still not much better than our prehistoric ancestors. The formation of our beliefs is fraught with superstitions too. Not unlike one of our forefathers who scratched his nose, saw rain fall, and developed an elaborate method of scratching his nose to bring on the rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserve Board, or the success of a company by the appointment of a new President. But the fact of the matter is they may not be linked at all. Even if they're somehow connected, it may be because the rate cut or appointment happened at the right time and at the right place. So the writer asks if we sometimes take experts too seriously as they read anything and everything into randomness.

Okay, that's all for now. I'll give you guys a more thorough review when I'm done. But I think this deserves at least 3 out of 5 stars, for it's a rather funny read for a subject matter that may not be worth writing about.