More often than not, rich people are no smarter than the average Joe. No matter what most capitalist societies say, luck plays a massive role in deciding the wealth of an individual. Chapter 1: If You’re So Rich, Why Aren’t You So Smart? the skewness problem: it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.the induction/black swan problem: how can we anticipate unpredictable events?.the luck/asymmetry problem: which comes with the help of luck can be taken away by luck (the flipside is more optimistic: things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness).Inspired by the famous ancient story of Solon and Croesus (told by Herodotus), Taleb uses the first part of Fooled by Randomness (which encompasses about half of the book) to talk about three things: Split into three parts and fourteen sections, and written in a clear and casual, witty and comprehensible manner (which recalls “the best of scientist/essayists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould”), Fooled by Randomness is filled with so many good ideas that we think it deserves a chapter-by-chapter summary.
In essence, it suggests that many of the outcomes we consider non-random are actually quite random and that our belief that they are not is responsible for some of the greatest catastrophes of the modern era. Its first part is Fooled by Randomness, the book we’re about to summarize today. Widely considered the world’s foremost expert on randomness and arbitrariness-as well as one of the loudest advocates for the creation of “black swan,” “robust,” and “antifragile” organizations and societies-he has dedicated most of his life to this question, culminating in a multi-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled Incerto. Well, Lebanese-American scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb certainly has.
Have you ever wondered what precisely is randomness and what its definition tells us about the way we live our lives?
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