He sent an early copy to Taleb to get his review. Your point is nulled. "“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice.

He sent an early copy to Taleb to get his review. Your point is nulled. "“When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan Just to point to you, you seem to mis-characterize him as saying "Everything is random!" Here is a complete quote. "The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress. The beneficial properties have to reside in the type of exposure, that is, the payoff function and not in the "luck" part: there needs to be a significant asymmetry between the gains (as they need to be large) and the errors (small or harmless), and it is from such asymmetry that luck and trial and error can produce results. The general mathematical property of this asymmetry is convexity (which is explained in Figure 1); functions with larger gains than losses are nonlinear-convex and resemble financial options. Critically, convex payoffs benefit from uncertainty and disorder. The nonlinear properties of the payoff function, that is, convexity, allow us to formulate rational and rigorous research policies, and ones that allow the harvesting of randomness." http://edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility http://edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substit...