The author does understand his limitation to some degree and even suggests skipping certain chapters, though to be honest, the chapters he recommends skipping I found to be the best in the book. Taleb is a pretty good writer, but I thought this was a very uneven book. As I read it I was constantly alternating between "Wow, that's a really great insight, a great way of presenting it" and "Gee, who doesn't realize that?", or even "That just seems flat-out wrong". In scalable professions, you do the same work whether you produce a hundred units or 1000. For a podcast, the effort to reach 10 people might be similar to that of reaching 10 million people. In writing, the same effort is taken to attract one reader, or several hundred million – JK Rowling doesn’t have to write a book each time someone reads it.

It bears repeating that humans’ ability to predict in the short-term is unique among animal species and quite possibly the reason we’ve survived and thrived as long as we have. To predict is human. As exemplified by figures like Beyoncé and Jeff Bezos, social and economic advantages accrue highly unequally in Extremistan. In Mediocristan environments, there’s a limit to the amount of randomness or deviation from the average. Inequalities exist, but they’re mild or controlled. Usually, there’re some physical constraints (e.g. height, weight, running speed) which limit the amount of variability. For example, if you add the tallest or heaviest man in history to a sample size of 1,000 people, the outlier won’t make a real difference to the average. There’s also typically a linear relationship between variables. Prediction is possible in such environments or systems. Babitz’s writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom—bewitching an entire city, but all too brief.”— Los Angeles Review of BooksCertain professionals ... don't know more about their subject matter than the general population." Except when they do.

I didn't find him as arrogant as others said he is (try Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, now that's arrogance), mainly because of his intelligence, and humor which made me snort from the beginning to the end. Yes, he's trashing some celebrities' statements in the field, but the way he does it is quite witty and hilarious (albeit not that nice). Statisticians, it has been shown, tend to leave their brains in the classroom and engage in the most trivial inferential errors once they are let out on the streets." Taleb's observations on the expectations and biases we hold, especially when estimating risk or uncertainty, are pretty dead on.

I guess that if someone loves Eve Babitz right now it is a red flag for me. Her writing style was not the problem for me but what she was talking about.

And the best way to demonstrate that his judgement is correct, see this statement made in the essay following the end of this 2nd edition, in 2010: "Once again, I am not saying that we need to stop globalization and travel. We just need to be aware of the side effects, the trade-offs - and few people are. I see the risk of a very strange acute virus spreading through out the planet." Consider the fate of Giaccomo, the opera singer at the end of the 19th Century. In his day, there was no way of storing his work, so his presence was required for every single performance, so the pie was evenly split, relatively, as inequalities existed but were mild. At this time in history, there is no scalability yet, no way to double the largest in person audience without having to sing twice. Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. Chapter four brings together the topics discussed earlier into a narrative about a turkey before Thanksgiving who is fed and treated well for many consecutive days, only to be slaughtered and served as a meal. Taleb uses it to illustrate the philosophical problem of induction and how past performance is no indicator of future performance. [14] He then takes the reader into the history of skepticism. Ultimately, our world and future are unknowable and unpredictable because of various factors, including:

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The author's tone throughout the book, slightly irreverent, didn't annoy me as much as it seems to have bothered other readers. I enjoyed learning a new way to look at reality, but, as I mentioned before, this is a dense read and I wouldn't consider it "fun" reading either. Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud." He rails against misuse of the bell curve by those "who wear dark suits" without ever giving a single god damn specific example. He accuses whole fields of study, like economics, of being rife with mathematical theatrics. If that's true I'd love to read about it. But he offers no evidence for this, and is more guilty of this particular offense than any person I know. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2... What stands out about Babitz’s writing is her voice: smart, unapologetic and knowing, like Dorothy Parker magically time traveling to the modern era . . . Rereading Babitz is a delicious, guilty pleasure.”— Alta Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable." Except when it's not.