Quick review of Fooled by Randomness:
The writing is terrible. Every other paragraph references some other chapter. Stories are told about investment philosophies by creating empty straw-man stereotypes designed to make you feel good about hating normal traders, like the author. It slips between first, second and third-person omniscient at random.
Nassim Taleb sounds like a genuinely awful person. An opera hipster who trashes fellow rich people for “going to the symphony in some vain attempt to be ‘cultured’” while simultaneously bragging about his own poetic and “real” intellectual interests. He’s like that asshole nerd in high school who got picked on and only responded with grandiose claims about how smart he is. His arrogance and misanthropy seep through nearly every sentence.
That said, the ideas in the book are some of the most important you’ll read about markets, success, and money. It has a few good examples of very simple situations demonstrating survivor bias and the difference between signal and noise. It will change the way you think about success, and what advice to take from anyone.
Until someone writes a less sloppy treatise on signal vs noise, I strongly recommend reading it.