Fran Kinniry on Private Equity Portfolio Investments (Podcast)

This book is a collection of essays that delve into how humans make decisions under uncertainty, focusing on the mental shortcuts (heuristics) and systematic errors (biases) that occur. It covers various heuristics such as representativeness, availability, and anchoring, and their implications in different fields like economics and psychology.

In 'Antifragile', Nassim Nicholas Taleb delves into the concept of antifragility, arguing that some systems not only withstand stress and disorder but actually benefit from them. The book builds on ideas from his previous works, such as 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan', and is part of his five-volume philosophical treatise on uncertainty, 'Incerto'. Taleb provides examples from various fields, including science, economics, and history, to illustrate how antifragility can be achieved and how it contrasts with fragility and robustness. He also discusses strategies like the barbell strategy and optionality, and critiques modern society's attempts to eliminate volatility, which he believes are harmful. The book is praised for its revolutionary ideas and multidisciplinary approach, though it has also received criticism for its style and some of the author's views on mental health and other topics.

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis chronicles the intellectual and personal relationship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists whose research fundamentally changed our understanding of human decision-making. Their studies, conducted from the late 1960s to the 1980s, exposed systematic errors in human judgment under uncertainty and laid the foundation for behavioral economics. The book delves into their extraordinary lives, including their careers in the Israeli military, and how their personal differences and eventual estrangement affected their work. Lewis's narrative makes complex psychological concepts accessible through engaging storytelling, highlighting the profound impact of Kahneman and Tversky's work on various fields, including economics, medicine, and government regulation.

In 'Fooled by Randomness', Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the pervasive influence of chance and randomness in our lives and financial markets. The book argues that humans tend to underestimate the role of luck and overestimate the role of skill, leading to biases such as hindsight bias, survivorship bias, and the narrative fallacy. Taleb emphasizes the importance of recognizing and coping with uncertainty, and he critiques the tendency to seek deterministic explanations for random events. The book is part of Taleb's Incerto series, which also includes 'The Black Swan', 'The Bed of Procrustes', 'Antifragile', and 'Skin in the Game'.