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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is a literary essayist, multidisciplinary scholar, and former trader obsessed with the multidisciplinary problems of uncertainty. His interests lie at the juncture of philosophy, mathematics, business, and the social sciences, but he has stayed extremely close to the ground thanks to an uninterrupted two-decade career as a quantitative trader and risk manager in New York and London.
Taleb is the former Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He also taught at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. His degrees include an MBA from the Wharton School and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris.
In addition to his scientific and literary interests, Taleb’s hobby is to poke fun at those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages (even French) and has more than a million readers. He lives mostly in New York.
Also by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan
Footnotes
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Chapter 7
*What I call empiricism does not simply mean “just look at reality”: it implies the rigorous avoidance of hasty generalizations outside what you saw, your “empiri-cism.” This covers the relation between the past and the future (the past might not be a representative sample of the future, but it also concerns other generalizations we take for granted, in medicine, politics, and science).
Return to text.
*Popper was not the originator of these ideas on asymmetry: a class of
skeptical thinkers such as Sextus Empiricus, Aenesidemus, or al-Ghazälï came up with the ideas before him, as well as Mill and Hume. But Popper rephrased the problem in-dependently and put it in modern terms.
Return to text.
Fooled by Randomness is a work of nonfiction, but certain names of nonpublic figures have been changed, and some of the private individuals described are fictionalized or composite portraits.
Copyright © 2004 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in the United States in hardcover by TEXERE, part of Thomson Corporation, in 2004,and in trade paperback by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taleb, Nassim.
Fooled by randomness: the hidden role of chance in life and in the markets / Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Thomson/Texere, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Investments. 2. Chance. 3. Random variables. I. Title.
HG4521.T285 2005
123’.3—dc22 2005049005
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-767-9
v3.0
Fooled by Randomness Page 32