I have been recommended this book and I cannot stop reading it! I haven’t finished it, but already can’t wait to share some of the great thoughts it contains!
The idea that a pure luck is behind almost everything that we encounter was cultivating inside my mind for a while and this book describes best what I tried to figure out.
On top of the odds and volatilities, the book talks about our self-imposed biases, noise that distorts our reality perception and black swan events. Through basic examples and thorough fundamentals discussion (i.e. Shiller redux, Monte Carlo simulation), it creates an important foundation to anyone interested in psychology, negotiations or applied sciences.
Here are some quotes that moved me
“The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.”
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”
“Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.”
“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”