Amused because we are so foolish in the way we reason, and fearful because I think Taleb would find me foolish. I amused and fearful at the same time while reading the book. What makes this arrogance bearable is that he is so funny. He does not suffer fools gladly, and liberally showers criticism on all sorts of people. How? You need to give the book a try to experience that.Fooled by Randomness is written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is the cleverest author I have read. The author certainly has the ability to intrigue you if not impress you with his work. No doubt he had a lot of trouble in getting his first book published.

He has bluntly criticized some of the very known authors for their myopic view. He has not only presented his ideas in the book but also discussed what people think about him and his ideas. N N Taleb is not your regular “all well behaved” kind of an author. Author discusses at length about the ideas of other thinkers like himself some of whom he likes or dislikes.

Having said that the book gets slightly technical and boring at times (maybe due to the financial trading background of the author) particularly for a reader without a finance background.

The best part about the book is that it challenges a lot of socially accepted ideas which we may have adopted as facts of our lives.

The author has beautifully explained all these concepts supported with relevant examples. The book is broadly divided into 3 parts – first part talks about the concept of randomness and how we tend to forget about the possibility of a “black swan” event and large impact such a event may cause, second part discusses about biases we may be suffering from like survival-ship bias, extends the ides to non-linearity and the last part talks about the human aspect of dealing with uncertainty. This book made me think that a lot of us may be putting too much emphasis on certain things around us than they deserve like success of a stock market guru or an entrepreneur who made big with his/ her idea or an individual turning around the fate of a multi-billion dollar company, etc. I recently read this book titled Fooled by Randomness written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb which presents the idea of role of randomness or chance in our life. But do you believe that luck has played a significant role in your life’s achievements ?

Fooled by randomness review