Incerto
#845 of 2,654 all-time
Incerto
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
8 people recommended it in 6 threads, 2017–2026.
1 commenter pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.
What people on Hacker News said
This series forced me to revisit several assumptions. Something that still resonates is valuing anything – particularly books – that has aged well across several years, because it's clearly valuable; and to discount the new shiny.
The Incerto Series by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: where to start...I started reading this series over a decade ago and I still think about it weekly. It can be very dense to get through as I took a lot of notes. But I think it's worth the trouble.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general.
Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more)
They taught me about the importance of tail events, and started my interest in probability theory. More importantly, they taught me how to live a good life.
On anti-models, read NN Taleb's books (the Incerto) and Charlie Munger (his speech on inversion / thinking about what you would do, and how you would do it, in order to ensure a miserable life — and then not doing those things).
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in? 2022 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade? 2019 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: If I am 16 what should I learn? Which books should read? 2026 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before? 2020 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything? 2019 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why? 2017 · 1 recommendation