Summary: Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Unabridged‪)‬

Please note: This is a summary of the book, not the original book. This summary is not endorsed by or affiliated with the original author.

Randomness is everywhere and involved in almost everything, especially politics and the economy. Presidents foolishly boast about all the jobs that “he created”, when it was only the chance of the market. Our belief that we owe our success to our own abilities, instead of recognizing most of our success comes from chance, is just another primitive superstition from our ancient past, the author argues. The human mind all too often sees elephants in the clouds, when it's really just water vapors that happen to have randomly assumed shapes we associate with elephants for a brief period of time.

The author is particularly critical of the literary mind, which is trained to see meaning where there is only noise. The literary mind is so obsessed with meaning that it extracts all sorts of meanings from obscure passages and insignificant events that have nothing to do with those meanings at all. They see the intent of an author where it was clearly only random, such as a minute word choice or the placement of a certain imagery.

The study of randomness is a young science, but quickly growing. The error that skill is more important than sheer fortune has its worst impact in the market, the author argues. We all too often hold up a great businessman in high esteem for his great skill and vision, when in reality 99.9 percent of his riches are due purely to chance.