Fooled By Randomness

The book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is a book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a philosopher of randomness.

After reading the book, I know:

1. If you are not getting your kicks being a trader, become a dentist.

2. If you see pigs waltzing in the sky among the cloud patterns, look again, they are just clouds.

3. If a bunch of black swans happen to fly by your house, you can count yourself blessed, for such an event to happen would be overturning probability, physics, genetic research and assyrian music on its head.

4. If even one black swan were to fly by your house, you can count yourself extremely lucky, for such an event also would begin leading to above mentioned effects.

5. If said black swan were to fly by your house, you should start preparing for the worst, for it is a symbol of highly unlikely (and bad) events.

6. Random is as random can be. Or maybe not. People tend to explain random as non-random. Or the other way around. I dont know anymore.

7. We look for answers where there are none, and indeed need not even be. But we look anyway.

8. We see only the one lucky chap who wrote his masterpiece and booked himself the booker, pulitzer and other such along the way. We miss out on the other two trillion ninety zillion and fifty five who didnt. This is surviving a bias. Or some such.

9. When you bet and win, you win small - you can do this for a long long time. But when you lose - you lose BIG.

10. The Infinite Monkey Theorem has references in more places than I thought possible.

And finally, if I were a trader on the market hedging my bets, or looking out for the black swan, or wondering why the dog did not bark, or trying to count how many times in an hour the phone did not ring, and seriously considering the possibility of ending up like Buridan's Donkey, what are the chances that I would say dump it all and become a dentist?

That, my friend, is as random as random can get.