This book has a lot of overlap with the other book, "Black Swan" in more ways that one.
1. It is necessary to fish through the book to find the author's points. The whole book could have been written in just over 1/2 the space that it actually took to write it.
2. The author's ego came through on every page. Every single page. Every single, solitary page. Has there ever been a book in which "I" was used more often?
3. In a continuation of the first point, the author chose some very strange subtitles for each chapter. For example: "Wax in My Ears" went off on a story about someone who was tied to a mast and had wax put in his sailors ears so as to have them be able to avoid the Sirens' song. And can you imagine that it took all that just to say that the author does not listen to readers comments?
4. The book started off easily enough to read and then seemed to get exponentially harder as time went on. By the time I got to the last 50 pages or so, it was dragging along enough for me to read it.
Taleb's "....more on that later" was REALLY annoying. What would have been the problem with addressing a point from start to finish? It seems like he used that phrase 10 or 15 times in the book.
On the good side:
1. The author did make some good points (that had actually been made before) such as the difference between the Utopian Vision and the Tragic Vision.
2. There were some definitions of finance terms that I had not heard before, and the book was useful in that sense.
In summary:
1. Interestingness: Great topic, but verbose presentation.
2. Ease of Reading: Not as good as it might have been
3. Coherence: Fair. The whole structure of the book would have been helped by a glossary and subtitles that clearly pointed to the topic
4. Value of Information/ unit of time: Fair. As before, if the book had gotten to the point, the value of information gathered per unit of time could have gotten much better.Get more detail about Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.
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