Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacman2 | Hacker News Reader

I have not read it. The black swan was interesting. But in the end I may have liked books from Mandelbrot more. I have met professional traders that did not know (and became very angry) when told that far out of the money options are underpriced because it is not a random walk but a fat tail distribution.

I have not read Thinking Fast and Slow ether but really disliked "The tipping point" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Most impressive book: Thus spoke Zarathustra.

View on HN

Mandelbrot was such an entertaining writer. I enjoyed The Misbehavior of Markets a lot.

He does tell a few “I’m such a badass” stories a la Taleb, but somehow he’s a much more sympathetic character. When he talks about bullying some bureaucrat into accepting his dissertation, you can’t help but root for him. Like, it’s a pretty bombastic story, but at the same time he’s such an underdog in the story itself.

Plus the mathematical modeling stuff was eye opening for me too.

Highly recommended.

Edit to add: Kahneman’s writing is much closer to Mandelbrot than to Taleb. I think you’d like Thinking Fast and Slow.

So called fat tailed distributions are a random walk. It’s just that their sample distribution is a power law (no mean hence fat tail). Example of which is a Lévy flight: a random walk with a heavy tail.

Here’s a link for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_flight

Reply on news.ycombinator.com