Thinking, Fast and Slow
"Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events. We cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was actually predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. Our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability and the role of luck in outcomes. We are prone to blame decision-makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appeared obvious only after the fact. This is the essence of outcome bias."
The Enigma of Reason
Reason, we argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying oneself, and that of producing arguments to convince others. These two rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related.
Fooled By Randomness
This book is about luck disguised and perceived as nonluck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism). It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason. Such confusion crops up in the most unexpected areas, even science, though not in such an accentuated and obvious manner as it does in the world of business.