Fooled by Randomness Read Free

large, of luck, owing to the randomness in his profession, I do not need to “test” it—the Russian roulette thought experiment suffices. All I need is to show that there exists an alternative explanation to the theory that he is a genius. My approach is to manufacture a cohort of intellectually challenged persons and show how a small minority can evolve into successful businessmen—but these are the ones who will be visible. I am not saying that Warren Buffett is not skilled; only that a large population of random investors will
almost necessarily
produce someone with his track records
just by luck.
    Missing a Hoax
    I was also surprised at the fact that in spite of the book’s aggressive warning against media journalism I was invited to television and radio shows in both North America and Europe (including a hilarious
dialogue de sourds
on a Las Vegas radio station where the interviewer and I were running two parallel conversations). Nobody protected me from myself and I accepted the interviews. Strangely, one needs to use the press to communicate the message that the press is toxic. I felt like a fraud coming up with vapid sound bites, but had fun at it.
    It may be that I was invited because the mainstream media interviewers did not read my book or understand the insults (they don’t “have the time” to read books) and the nonprofit ones read it too well and felt vindicated by it. I have a few anecdotes: A famous television show was told that “this guy Taleb believes that stock analysts are just random forecasters” so they seemed eager to have me present my ideas on the program. However, their condition was that I make three stock recommendations to prove my “expertise.” I didn’t attend and missed the opportunity for a great hoax by discussing three stocks selected randomly and fitting a well-sounding explanation to my selection.
    On another television show I mentioned that “people think that there is a story when there is none” as I was discussing the random character of the stock market and the backfit logic one always sees in events after the fact. The anchor immediately interjected: “There was a story about Cisco this morning. Can you comment on that?” The best: When invited to an hour-long discussion on a financial radio show (they had not read Chapter 11 ), I was told a few minutes before to refrain from discussing the ideas in this book because I was invited to talk about trading and not about randomness (another hoax opportunity certainly, but I was too unprepared for it and walked out before the show started).
    Most journalists do not take things too seriously: After all, this business of journalism is about pure entertainment, not a search for truth, particularly when it comes to radio and television. The trick is to stay away from those who do not seem to know that they are just entertainers (like George Will, who will appear in Chapter 2 ) and actually believe that they are
thinkers.
    Another problem was in the interpretation of the message in the media: This guy Nassim thinks that markets are random,
hence they are going lower,
which made me the unwilling bearer of catastrophic messages. Black swans, those rare and unexpected deviations, can be both good and bad events.
    However, media journalism is less standardized than it appears; it attracts a significant segment of thoughtful people who manage to extricate themselves from the commercial sound bite–driven system and truly care about the message rather than just catching the public’s attention. One naive observation from my conversations with Kojo Anandi (NPR), Robin Lustig (BBC), Robert Scully (PBS), and Brian Lehrer (WNYC) is that the nonprofit journalist is altogether another intellectual breed. Casually, the quality of the discussion correlates inversely with the luxury of the studios: WNYC, where I felt that Brian Lehrer was making the greatest effort at getting into the arguments, operates out of the shabbiest offices I