A Bow to Lady Luck
By James K. Glassman

Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page F01

Heard the one about the monkey and the typewriter?

"If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them [will] come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad,' " writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb in a recent book, "Fooled by Randomness."

The monkey typist story is an old one, and the key word is "infinite." But Taleb takes this hoary tale a step further. "Now that we have found that hero among monkeys, would any reader invest his life's savings on a bet that the monkey would write the 'Odyssey' next?"

Taleb's point is that the past frequently tells us nothing at all about the future, even though many of us believe it does and make investments accordingly. "Think about the monkey showing up at your door with his impressive past performance. Hey, he wrote the 'Iliad.' "

…Taleb's argument is that people are often tricked, mainly by the architecture of their own brains, into thinking that things that happen at random are actually happening by design. Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist and philosopher, wrote more than two centuries ago of "the overweening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities [and] their absurd presumption in their own good fortune."