Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets", Penguin Books, 2007. First published in 2001 (with an updated edition in 2004), Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness marks the first book in the "Incerto" series. It was selected by Fortune magazine as "one of the smartest books of all time" -- that's setting some high expectations! In my own opinion, this book is somewhat underwhelming after reading The Black Swan  (and I recently finished Antifragile , which is also more original and expansive). But that being said, Fooled by Randomness  is not a bad book; it is still a showcase of the author's wit, and marks a transition point between his life as a trader and as a literary essayist and professor. One can even witness the author's thinking shift from the "randomness foolishness" of Wall Street (this book), to examining the rare event  more broadly ( The ...

Book Review: Tim Harford, "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure", Hachette Digital, 2011. In my review of The Undercover Economist  and The Undercover Economist Strikes Back , I noted that there is also a third Tim Harford book on Conceptually's bookshelf . Indeed, that book is Adapt  -- a book about bottom-up trial-and-error approaches to solving complex problems. For an economist who believes in the power of markets, this seems like a logical literary foray. ( Recall that, for economists L. von Mises and F. Hayek, the market's price system functions as a decentralized "economic calculator".) However, Adapt is about much more than economics; it touches on a diverse range of issues including terrorism, climate change, innovation, evolution, nuclear accidents, and even art. In the first of eight chapters, the author talks about how the complexity of the modern world can make it hard to solve problems, even for leaders and experts. Even the l...