Fooled By Randomness ^{2nd Ed.}

Everyone wants to succeed in life. But what causes some of us to be more successful than others? Is it really down to skill and strategy — or something altogether more unpredictable?

This book is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. It is all about luck: more precisely, how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the markets — we hear an entrepreneur has 'vision' or a trader is 'talented', but all too often their performance is down to chance rather than skill. It is only because we fail to understand probability that we continue to believe events are non-random, finding reasons where none exist.

This irreverent bestseller has been translated into eighteen languages and has shattered the illusions of people around the world by teaching them to recognize randomness. Now it can do the same for you.

• Preface
• Acknowledgments for the Updated Second Edition
• Chapter Summaries
• Prologue
• Part I: Solon's Warning
  Skewness, Asymmetry, Induction
• One: If You're So Rich, Why Aren't  You So Smart?
• Nero Tulip
• Hit by Lightning
• Temporary Sanity
• Modus Operandi
• No Work Ethics
• There Are Always Secrets
• John the High-Yield Trader
• An Overpaid Hick
• The Red-Hot Summer
• Serotonin and Randomness
  
• Your Dentist Is Rich, Very Rich
• Two: A Bizarre Accounting Method
• Alternative History
• Russian Roulette
• Possible Worlds
• An Even More Vicious Roulette
• Smooth Peer Relations
• Salvation via Aeroflot
• Solon Visits Regine's Nightclub
• George Will Is No Solon
• On Counterintuitive Thruths
• Humiliated in Debates
• A Different Kind of Earthquake
• Proverbs Galore
• Risk Managers
• Epiphenomena
• Three: A Mathematical Meditation on History
• Europlayboy  Mathematics
• The Tools
• Monte Carlo Mathematics
• Fun in My Attic
• Making History
• Zorglubs Crowding the Attic
• Denigration of History
• The Stove Is Hot
• Skills in Predicting Past History
• My Solon
• Distilled Thinking On Your Palmpilot
• Breaking News
• Shiller Redux
• Gerontocracy
• Philostratus in Monte Carlo: On the Difference Between Noise and Information
• Four: Randomness, Nonsense, and the Scientific Intellectual
• Randomness and the Verb
• Reverse Turing Test
• The Father of All Pseudothinkers
• Monte Carlo Poetry
• Five: Survival of the Least Fit — Can Evolution Be Fooled by Randomness?
• Carlos the Emerging-Markets Wizard
• The Good Years
• Averaging Down
• Lines in the Sand
• John the High-Yield Trader
• The Quant Who Knew Computers and Equations
  
• The Traits They Shared
• A Review of Market Fools of Randomness Constants
• Naive Evolutionary Theories
• Can Evolution Be Fooled by Randomness?
• Six: Skewness and Asymmetry
• The Median Is Not the Message
• Bull and Bear Zoology
• An Arrogant Twenty-nine-year-old Son
• Rare Events
• Symmetry and Science
• Almost Everybody Is Above Average
• The Rare-Event Fallacy
• The Mother of All Deceptions
• Why Don't Statisticians Detect Rare Events?
• A Mischievous Child Replaces the Black Balls
• Seven: The Problem of Induction
• From Bacon to Hume
• Cygnus Atratus
• Niederhoffer
• Sir Karl's Promoting Agent
• Location, Location
• Popper's Answer
• Open Society
• Nobody Is Perfect
• Induction and Memory
• Pascal's Wager
• Thank You. Solon
• Part II: Monkeys on Typewriters
  Survivorship and Other Biases
• It Depends On the Number of Monkeys
• Vicious Real Life
• This Section
• Eight: Too Many Millionaries Next Door
• How to Stop the Sting of Failure
• Somewhat Happy
• Too Much Work
• You're a Failure
• Double Survivorship Bias
• More Experts
• Visibility Winners
• It's a Bull Market
• A Guru's Opinion
• Nine: It Is Easier to Buy and Sell Than Fry an Egg
• Fooled by Numbers
• Placebo Investors
• Nobody Has to Be Competent
• Regression to the Mean
• Ergodicity
• Life Is Coincidental
• The Mysterious Letter
• An Interrupted Tennis Game
• Reverse Survivors
• The Birthday Paradox
• It's a Small World!
• Data Mining, Statistics, and Charlatanism
• The Best Book I Have Ever Read!
• The Backtester
• A More Unsettling Extension
• The Earnings Season: Fooled by the Results
• Comparative Luck
• Cancer Cures
• Professor Pearson Goes to Monte Carlo (Literally): Randomness Does Not Look Random!
• The Dog That Did Not Bark: On Biases in Scientific Knowledge
• I Have No Conclusions
• Ten: Loser Takes All — On the Nonlinearities of Life
• The Sandpile Effect
• Enter Randomness
• Learning to Type
• Mathematics Inside and Outside the Real World
• The Science of Networks
• Our Brain
• Buridan's Donkey or the Good Side of Randomness
• When It Rains, It Pours
• Eleven: Randomness and Our Mind: We Are Probability Blind
• Paris or the Bahamas?
• Some Architectural Considerations
• Beware of the Philosopher Bureaucrat
• Satisficing
• Flawed, Not Just Imperfect
• Kahneman and Tversky
• Where Is Napoleon When We Need Him?
• "I'm As Good As My Last Trade" and Other Heuristics
• Degree in a Fortune Cookie
• Two Systems of Reasoning
• Why We Don't Marry the First Date
• Our Natural Habitat
• Fast and Frugal
• Neurobiologists Too
• Kafka in a Courtroom
• An Absurd World
• Examples of Biases in Understanding Probability
• We Are Option Blind
• Probabilities and the Media (More Journalists)
• CNBC at Lunchtime
• You Should Be Dead by Now
• The Bloomberg Explanations
• Filtering Methods
• We Do Not Understand Confidence Levels
• An Admission
• Part III: Wax in my Ears
  Living With Randomitis
• I Am Not So Intelligent
• Wittgenstein's Ruler
• The Odyssean Mute Command
• Twelve: Gambler's Ticks and Pigeons in a Box
• Taxi-Cab English and Casuality
• The Skinner Pigeon Experiment
• Philostratus Redux
• Thirteen: Carneades Comes to Rome: On Probability and Sketicism
• Carneades Comes to Rome
• Probability, the Child of Skepticism
• Monsieur de Norpois' Opinions
• Path Dependence of Beliefs
• Computing Instead of Thinking
• From Funeral to Funeral
• Fourteen: Bachus Abandons Antony
• Notes on Jackie O.'s Funeral
• Randomness and Personal Elegance
• Epilogue: Solon Told You So
• Beware the London Traffic Jams
• Postscript: Three Afterthoughts in the Shower
• First Thought: The Inverse Skills Problem
• Second Thought: On Some Additional Benefits of Randomness
• Uncertainty and Happiness
• The Scrambling of Messages
• Third Thought: Standing on One Leg
• Acknowledgments for the First Edition
• A Trip to the Library: Notes and Reading Recommendations
• Notes
• References

This is an excellent book that will challenge your thought patterns!

I usually doesn't like the rambling style of the author, but he manages to conveys his points very well.

Recommended reading, if for nothing else, you'll be able to defend your way of thinking a lot more coherent afterwards.