Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a painfully bad book. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's observations are completely trivial, lacking any depth and conclusion whatsoever, and it takes you a while to understand that this book is not about randomness and the way the human brain is easily fooled when interpreting information. This book is about Taleb himself - one huge ego trip and at the end impossible to read. No one can criticize the intellectual message of the book - that humans make bad decisions because they underestimate the fundamental effects of uncertainty. But Taleb misses to discuss the immense amount of research available in this field performed since quite some time by economists, psychologists, and others. In fact, the entire field of behavioral finance is devoted to the broad outlines of this book. It is one thing that there is absolutely nothing new in this book; it does not even provide a synopsis of interesting research or real-live implications or applications. What is more embarrassing even is that Taleb steals some of the best episodes in behavioral finance without feeling the need to reference his sources. What makes Taleb's book so unbearable is that he is so full of himself for knowing Greek mythology and all the philosophers while at the same time knowing about financial engineering. He tells us several times that he is working out. At the end of this book you will feel fooled by this guy for writing a book so irrelevant, worse yet, you will feel bad for having been fooled into investing time and money. If you are looking for intellectual stimulation, you are better off with some of the classics, such as J.A. Paulos' "Beyond Numeracy". Or I suggest you read G.A. Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" article, just a couple of pages long and written in 1970, a little masterpiece that is as powerful as it is simple.