Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Before reading the review, consider the following two question:

1) If the average human life is 72 (let’s ignore gender, race, income, location, etc, just to keep the question simple), how many more years should you expect to live?

2) A test for some disease has a 5% rate of giving false positives (and a 0% chance at a false negative).  The disease occurs in 1 in ever 1000 people, and everyone is tested regardless of whether they show symptoms.  You are tested and the test comes back positive.  What are the odds you have the disease?

(Answers at the end.)  A shockingly high number of people get these questions wrong.  Not just ordinary people, but doctors, statisticians, and other people who really shouldn’t be messing this up.

Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is not for the feignt of brain.  Taleb explores the role chance plays in our daily lives and in the daily lives of Wall Street traders.  Written in 2004, Fooled by Randomness isn’t just a response to the current financial crisis that looks back on the past with 20-20 vision.  Taleb also isn’t going to give you any advice on what stocks in invest in.

While I found the book extremely fascinating, I’m sure many people won’t.  It’s not just a book on randomness or a book about financial markets.  It’s part economics, part psychology, and part anecdotal story telling.  It’s also part asshole, as Taleb doesn’t come across as the nicest guy to be around, especially with how much he talks about how great he is at embarassing and intimidating people.  (People who brag about such skills typically are insecure about it and not really that good at whatever they claim.  A rich person doesn’t need to tell you he’s rich, a smart person that he’s smart, or a good looking person that he’s good looking.)

I found this book to be not quite as dense as Taleb’s The Black Swan, which deals with pretty much the exact same issues.  There are a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes to keep it moving, but at times it seems like Taleb would rather write drama than write about randomness, or that he just needed something to fill up the pages.  Taleb probably could have gotten all his points across in 50 pages, instead of 260 (not counting end notes and index).

In Fooled by Randomness you’ll learn about the errors in reasoning you make, but unfortunately probably won’t learn what to do about it.  In many examples Taleb shows how people who specialize in avoiding these mistakes professionally end up making them all the time in their personal lives, just like how a celebrity can fly in a personal jet on the way to giving a speech about reducing carbon footprints.

While I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, it was a bit too scatterbrained and lacking in a conciseness that would make it easily consumed, and I think ease of consumption is a big factor in a book about how to avoid really common (and seriously costly) mistakes.  Three stars:

Answers:

1) Take 72 and substract your age.  You answer should be MORE than that number.  Why?  You’ve survived up to the age you are now, while some people have not.  If you are 50 years old, your odds of making it to 80 are more than someone who is 10 years old.  If you’re 80 your odds of getting to 72 are even better than the 50 year old’s.  Think about that the next time you make a decision regarding your retirement planning.

2) Odds you have the disease are just under 2%.  If we test 1000 people, only 1 will have the disease (and will test positive).  But, with a 5% false positive rate, another 50 people will also test positive, for a total of 51 positive tests.  Odds you’re not a false positive are 1/51, or just under 2%.  Thank God we tend to only see the doctor when we have symptoms (which of course increases the odds that the test is correct and not just a false positive, because a disease is far more common in people with symptoms than the general population).

P.S.: Next time you meet a trader, ask them if they believe in the efficient market theory.  If so, ask them what the hell their job is.

Straw Signed @ 555 5th

Right now the Barnes and Noble at 555 5th Avenue has several signed copies of Darryl Strawberry’s autobiography Straw: Finding My Way.  It would be a great Father’s Day gift for those of you who know you won’t think of anything better.  Quantities are obviously limited, so I’d move fast.

The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street – John R. Talbott

This evening I went to John Talbott’s event at the Barnes and Noble at 555 5th Ave for his new book The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street.  I haven’t had time to do much more than just skim a few parts, but the talk he gave left me with a generally good impression.  I don’t have the finance background to say anything particularly intelligent (or particularly stupid) about his assessment of the current financial crisis.  But, the fact that he doesn’t give any simple, cliche “blame the whoever” explanation strikes me as a good sign.

The event was filmed by CSPAN and will air sometime in the future.  I didn’t think to find out when.

It’s unfortunate that with this type of book you don’t need to know much to point out errors, but need to know a whole lot to explain why something is correct.  So, my critique is going to have to be limited to some negative comments:

First, a couple of the “lies” aren’t things that anyone, aside from a few cranks and nutters, have claimed.  The statements would be untrue, sure, but for them to be lies, someone actually has to be claiming it.

7.  Free-market capitalism works best with no regulation and no interference from government.

I doubt anyone really thinks we should dispatch with the FDA, disallow law suits for malfunctioning circular saws, or let anyone with the cash buy a tank.  Not even Reagan thought we needed literally no regulation.  Sure, some people want much less regulation, and the rhetoric is sometimes oversimplified to this degree, but no one really thinks we need zero regulation.  We all want our doctors to have some sort of licensing procedure; we all want exotic security offerings to be subject to anti-fraud regulations.

10. Capitalism works equally well in all industries.

Show me someone who thinks free-market capitalism works well for highways, nuclear energy, the military, or law enforcement, and I’ll show you someone who’s yanking your chain.

79. Hedge funds should remain unregulated, because only sophisticated, knowledgeable investors can invest.

Talbott mentions several times that hedge funds are unregulated.  Not quite the case, and the proof is right there in the name he gives the lie.  If only sophisticated, knowledgeable investors can buy into hedge funds, that’s a regulation.  What Talbott means is that they are not registered and are not reporting to the SEC.  Reasonable minds can argue over whether there should be more or different regulations for hedge funds, but it’s simply inaccurate to say they are unregulated.

86. Excessive regulation is not needed in the financial markets because anyone who is harmed can seek redress in the courts.

Two problems with this one.  First, “excessive” regulation is never needed.  If you think it is needed, you obviously don’t know what “excessive” means.  The amount of regulation we need is, by definition, not excessive, it’s appropriate.  No one thinks appropriate regulation is unnecessary.  Second, I’ve yet to even hear of anyone who thinks the courts always provide adequate remedies.

I also had some issues with two comments Talbott made during his talk.

The first is that you won’t see anti-corporate messages out in mainstream media, because the media are owned by big corporations.  Well, Barnes and Noble has almost 800 stores in the country, employs 40,000 people and has an annual income over 5 billion dollars.  It’s a pretty big corporation and certainly could choose to not let Talbott talk, but I just don’t think most big corporations are going to edit media content to that degree.  Viacom isn’t going to pull the plug on Jon Stewart even if he openly criticizes Viacom.

I think the explanation for why is pretty simple: Jon Stewart brings in more money than would be lost by even the most radical of messages he could deliver.  Same thing with Barnes and Noble not just stocking Talbott’s book, but inviting him to talk in their stores.  So long as a message is popular enough to be profitable, companies will put it out there, even if the message is critical of the company.

Talbott also lays much of the blame for our current problems at the feet of high-powered Washington lobbyists.  I had the opportunity to ask him if it was unfair to place so much blame on lobbyists, when at the end of the day none of them get a vote.  I was not impressed with his answer: that lobbyists (and their massive corporate bankrolls) have too strong a hold on politicians for them to resist, and too much an influence in elections for us to vote out the bums who won’t stand up to them.

Well, if a lobbyist offered a senator millions of dollars to rob an innocent old lady would we say there’s no way the senator could possibly resist?  Hell no, we’d vote the bum out of office.*  We’ve done so for far smaller transgressions.  To quote the Godfather, “I believe in America.”  The day horse heads show up in congressional beds is the day we can say it’s alright for them to cave.  Until then we should have higher standards for our leaders.  I’m not saying the lobbyists aren’t also to blame, but that much of the blame must also be placed on the people actually passing (or not passing) regulations, and on the voters who don’t do something about it.

*Unless that bum is a Kennedy.

P.S.: The biggest lie on Wall Street is the shrimp cocktail at Ulysses.  $10 for 4 medium shrimp?  Bollocks!

Free-Range Chickens – Simon Rich

“This is a joke book that I wrote.  Nothing in it is real.  It’s just some things that I made up.”

That pretty well sums up Free-Range Chickens, the latest book from Harvard Grad (and Lampoon editor), Simon Rich, who is currently a writer for Saturday Night Live.  Chickens is a collection of short jokes, mostly in the form of dialogue, that goes on a journey from early childhood through adult life, and ends with some thoughts on animals and God.

Chickens is light, quick, mostly clean, and funny in a way that will be pretty universally appealing.  Don’t plan on learning any good jokes to tell from it though.  Most would be awkward if spoken, and work far better on the page:

Terrifying childhood experience

–Got your nose!

–Please just kill me.  Better to die than to live the rest of my life as a monster.

If you liked that, you’ll like the rest.  If not, then you probably won’t like any of it.  And, you probably suck and should not interact with normal people.

However, at $17 it’s pretty pricey for just 129 pages, only a few of which are more than half-filled.  If you read as slow as I do, it’ll take about an hour.  You could go see all 96 minutes of Up in 3D for $15 instead.  Still, I’d recommend Free Range Chickens, with how short it is you can easily loan it out to your friends and be sure of a quick return.

Despite its short comings, I’m giving this one 4 stars:

P.S.  I picked up a signed copy from Barnes and Noble in Tribeca.  They may still have some there.