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Comment by coderholic | Hacker News Reader

I finally finished "Godel, Escher, Bach" in 2009, after starting and giving up on it a few times previously. A great book, but it does require a lot of time and some serious thinking with a pencil and pad to do some working out (or at least it did for me).

The best book I read in 2009 (and possibly ever!) was "Fooled By Randomness" - a fantastic book that I can't recommend enough. I also read the sequel, "Black Swans", that was interesting but not in the same league.

"Made to stick" was also a great book, with lots of great marketing advice that is simple to follow.

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I agree that Fooled By Randomness was a good read, but since then Taleb has become too wrapped up in self-aggrandizement, and he now thinks way to highly of himself and his abilities.

He lost me when he started writing articles like Ten Principles for a Black Swan-Proof World (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/tenprinciples.pdf). Isn't the point about Black Swans that they're impossible to protect against?

Agreed. I thought "Fooled..." and "The Black Swan" were great and I have a lot of respect for Taleb. But lately, he has become too self-aggrandizing.

He seems to take too much credit for saying that an unpredictable event could happen, a few years before a relatively unpredictable (or at least, unforeseen) event did happen.

Isn't the point about Black Swans that they're impossible to protect against?

No, actually. The point about Black Swans is that they are impossible to predict. But one can plan to avoid the severe CONSEQUENCES of unpredictable events. The illustration that Taleb gave in a conference talk video once posted to HN was that a resident of Florida doesn't know when the next hurricane will come, but can build a house that is more resistant to hurricane damage than the typical house. Similarly, some investment strategies can be genuinely hedged against rare events that will happen at unknown times, while other investment strategies expose the investor to debts greater than the original investment.

"Fooled By Randomness" is an interesting read and its central claim, namely that humans tend to see patterns where there aren't any, is correct and scientifically proved by psychology. However, the book seems to go way too far by occupying a strongly skeptic position and therefore refuting itself.

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