BOOK REVIEW Thoughts inspired by Nassim Taleb’s ‘Fooled by Randomness’

Nassim Taleb is a Wall Street trader who has written one technical book (‘Dynamic Hedging’, 1997) and two books for general audiences (‘Fooled by Randomness ’ in 2001 and ‘The Black Swan’ in 2007a) on the impact of uncertainty—particularly about rare events—in various aspects of life, including history, finance and the arts. Taleb’s general points—about variation, randomness and selection bias—will be familiar with quantitative social scientists and also to readers of historians such as Niall Ferguson and A. J. P. Taylor and biologists such as Stephen J. Gould who have emphasized the roles of contingency and variation in creating the world we see. Selection bias is important in politics and the law (consider, e.g. the challenge of estimating the probability that the accused is guilty as charged, conditional on that person being brought to court) as well as various other domains such as education (as has been discussed by statistician Howard Wainer, among others) and even sport. (For example, sabermetrician Bill James challenged the conventional wisdom in baseball that players peak around age 30 by noting that older players have been subject to selection—the worst of them have already retired—and when looking at individual careers, he found that performance was best, on average, around age 27.) See Wainer et al. (1998) and Gelman & Nolan (2002, Section 10.2) fo