We often admire and herald the “courageous.” But often courage is not driven by a brave person confronting the difficult and uncertain odds of the world. “Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.” We can make observations about the world without having the stats about them. Whereas statistics need logic (or reason) to be valid or meaningful, logic and reason do not need statistics to be valid. It’s important to remember that we often get the causality arrow wrong. This means that we have to leave the comforts of determinism, which often leverages stories and oversimplifications to falsely ascribe the “why” behind something occurring.

To think probabilistically, you have to be willing to consider that things could have worked out differently than they did. Because the future is random, we cannot precisely calculate the probabilities of what might happen. But probability is not a simple mathematical calculation. It’s the acceptance of uncertainty and the use of methods to deal with our collective ignorance and uncertain world. Probability is a branch of applied skepticism. And we craft compelling stories about why things happened, even if those stories are not true. We fail to fully appreciate the randomness of the world for a few reasons, the most important of which is that due to the hindsight bias, past events always look less random than they were.

These things do not cause you to benefit from randomness, but they can better position you over time and increase your odds of benefiting. The world does favor hard work and preparation. The central idea of the book is that the world is more random than we think. By the end, you’ll walk away with a greater appreciation for how randomness influences our lives and the ways you can avoid common and sometimes costly traps.Īccess My Searchable Collection of 100+ Book Notes Fooled by Randomness He argues that the world is not entirely random – there is a role for hard work, skills, and being prepared to help you ascend – but the role of luck is greater than you might imagine. Through stories about investing, thought experiments, and lessons from history, Nassim Taleb explores the idea of how randomness influences our world more than we think.

Fooled by randomness