Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

One of Taleb’s primary goals in Fooled by Randomness is to elucidate the forms of reasoning that shape human decision-making and to describe their repercussions. In his discussion of the differences between deductive and inductive reasoning, Taleb draws extensively on the work of eminent 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper. Considered the most influential philosopher of science, Popper’s 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery established falsifiability as the central tenet of scientific investigation. Popper argued that true scientific theories are built on propositions that can be proven false through observation or experimentation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers this example of a falsifiable statement: “‘All As are X’ […] is falsified if ‘Some A is not-X’ turns out to be true” (Thornton, Stephen. “Karl Popper.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). A falsifiable statement also represents an example of deductive reasoning, in which one first proposes a theory and then tests it against observations.

Popper’s argument for falsifiability developed out of his critique of the problems with inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning develops universal theories by extrapolating from discrete observations. The problem with inductive reasoning in science is that discrete observations are, by definition, based on incomplete and potentially flawed data, and therefore any theory extrapolated from that data will be prone to inaccuracies.