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Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $8.87
You Save: $7.13 (45%)
New (43) Used (22) from $8.80
Avg. Customer Rating:  379 reviews
Sales Rank: 1001
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2 Updated
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0812975219
Dewey Decimal Number: 123.3
EAN: 9780812975215
ASIN: 0812975219
Publication Date: August 23, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 are you fooled??? June 13, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
i find it fascinating the diverse reviews this book has received, it seems to have a polarizing effect on readers! for me the book was engrossing, but admittedly i am a fan of taleb's writing and philosophy of life. while he is clearly not concerned with journalistic rules he is able to communicate his point. so what if his sentence structure is not perfect. what i appreciate most about his works, fooled by randomness included is that they caused me to think, and rethink my own beliefs and perceptions about life. i felt challenged by the content and relished the opportunity to ponder paragraphs. this is the strength of his writing (in my humble estimation) to cause the reader to think. a worthy read even if you are prone to focus on the impossibly difficult particulars of writing in the english language...
Randomness fools us all. June 4, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This everyman's introduction to randomness should prove interesting to everyone who invests for profit, fun or retirement. The narrative style conveys the author's point that random spikes or troughs can occur in any investment without warning and that the oft used normal curve does not necessarily model the behavior of investments. It's sort of like saying that the normal wind speed is an accurate model for what could happen in tornado alley on a specific day in the summer.
That being said, there's little guidance for the investor about ameliorating the effects of "black swan" events; the best one can do is expect them and try to avoid being over-extended in yesterday's hot investment when the bottom falls out.
Fooled by Randomness - every day! May 30, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an extremely insightful individual with an equally impresive gift for storytelling.
His basic thesis is that although we like to think of our lives as ordered and predictable, they are extremely prey to random chance, and are in fact far far more so than most of us can even understand. We create delusions of predictabilty, mentally rewriting our own history in order to avoid excessive anxiety. He brings a unique perspective as both a genuine thinker and a man of practical experience in one of the most volatile occupational arenas of modern life - the stock market.
I found the autobiographical aspects of this book (both in the first person narrative, and the use of the fictional Nero Tulip) as interesting as its more philosphical and analytical content.
 Avoid this book May 28, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book is poorly written by a financial trader and money manager. He does a poor job actually answering any of the questions that he poses. He alludes to literary, philosophy and obscure historical figures in an arrogant manner. He comments probably ten times how he despises the wealthy, and yet begins a dozen paragraphs with phrases like, "While i was in London..., or "As i am writing this on a beach in Rio...". He talks about how well read he is, how much he loves to work out, and really does very little in assembling and proving his thesis. I would avoid this book.
Great Book May 26, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I thought this book was great although I didn't read the whole thing. It appears to confuse people because it attacks statistics while spending so much time examining them, but the title makes it clear that this is the intention of the book. This is an important point in our statistics obsessed socieity. Books like Freakenomics (which has a column in the NY Times) treat statisitcs as facts and reality as an illusion. (So if statistics show something obviously wrong then our "perceptions" must be wrong.) Educated people use statistics to show trounce those with less eduction and of course there's the stock market and various new financial istruments that rely on statistics. All of this is fatally flawed.
The other issue is his writing style, which is really old fashioned. I haven't read lots of old science books but it reminds me of Frankenstein, the mad scientist of alchemy. Of course, every writer is a politician now and with all the political correctness often you can't figure the sex of the writer let alone what they actually believe. But then they try to connect with you through way too much biography, like with Greenspan's book. Taleb obviously wasn't trying to run for office and he doesn't really tell us much about himself. If you've worked in tech or been to grad school lately you'd recognize this new personality, which can be insulting although Taleb is actually moderate in this regard. If you don't like him then don't go to grad school and don't work in any area with lots of elite foreigners.
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