Book: Fooled by Randomness
When I commented on the book Freakonomics back in May – I had a bunch of entertaining comments about this being a book that had been out for years. With that I mind, I decided to continue my noticeably antique view of the world with a comment on an absolutely FANTASTIC book I read recently: Fooled by Randomness (2001) by Nassim Taleb.
For those of you (who for some reason, like me, did not get to read this book when published) – Nassim Taleb is a mathematics and statistics adept trader, but perhaps more a philosopher who has out of the ordinary comments about probability, psychology and life.
This book should not be recommended reading for a web analyst or online marketer – but mandatory! I simply cannot recommend this enough and I will bring into play a handful of his thoughts over the next coming period. Such as:
.. and if the above subjects does not turn you on. It’s time to buy a Porsche.
The final question (for myself) - Am I fooled by randomness along with everybody else? hmmm :-)
Whatever the answer is — GO READ THE BOOK!! — I will question you in random aspects if I meet you in Washington (Emetrics) next week.
Cheers
October 10th, 2007 at 14:22
Dennis,
I completely agree with you about this book. When you are done with “Fooled by Randomness”, pick up “The Black Swan” by the same author. It goes into much more detail about how unpredictable events really are and how biased we all are.
Maybe we should start a book club ;-)
Best,
Michael Whitaker
October 10th, 2007 at 14:45
Hi Michael…
I am half way through “The Black Swan”… which is one of those books you simply have to read twice (as he turns a lot more philosophical), and hell yeah.. I am up for that book club. All we need is a bookstore and a sitcom deal.. and were set :-)
Cheers
October 10th, 2007 at 16:43
Totally agree. Although it is not that well written, that book has fired a lot of ideas and thoughts about marketing epistemology, and the type of knowledge we generate in Web analytics, i.e. is the knowledge we produce would stand the popperian test (not sure it would ;-))?
I look forward to reading the Black Swan, which I got, but haven,t had time to read.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:26
Hi Jacques
I think we (You, Me and Karl Popper) can agree that a great deal of the “insight” we create as Web Analysts are not Science – as defined by the Falsifiability concept.
But what are we then … Artists? :-)
If so, then it is time to change my suit for something else.
Great input – thanks a lot for commenting.
June 17th, 2008 at 14:17
[...] (actually somewhat depressing though) is the one brought up by Nassim Nicholas Talib in his books Fooled by Randomness and in particular The Black Swan, where he concludes that we tend to focus on what we know, as [...]