Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness", Penguin Books, 2009. Just over a decade ago, a book by the title Nudge took the world by storm. Today, there are numerous "nudge units" sponsored by governments (the most famous of which is the Behavioural Insights Team ), and one of the co-authors, Richard H. Thaler, won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Nudge is also listed on the Hufflepuff rationality bookshelf . Given the status of the book, it's odd that I haven't read it earlier. But now I have, and below are my notes. Nudge begins by asking how the director of food services for a city's school system should tell the cafeterias to arrange and display the food choices, knowing that (a) people, including kids, are influenced by small changes in context, such as the order of items, and (b) there's no way to avoid organizing the food. The authors, Richard Thaler and ...

Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder", Penguin Books, 2013. In his book Adapt , Tim Harford argues that we should be experimenting with multiple projects in parallel since not all of them will pay off, but when an experiment is successful, it can transform our lives for the better "in a way that a failed experiment will not transform them for the worse". This asymmetry lies at the heart of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Antifragile , which promotes the idea of antifragile tinkering or bricolage -- a kind of trial-and-error in which small mistakes are good and one wishes to "fail fast", because this gives one the option to keep a hugely favorable result while limiting the bad, as long as one has the rationality to identify and exploit large gains. (Incidentally, Taleb wrote a review for Harford's Adapt with rare praise: " Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down de...

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 ...