Nassim Nicholas Taleb, of the Black Swan fame wrote Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. This book is about how human knowledge can be trumpted by something new and unexpected. Taleb says that people are mostly unaware of the existence of randomness. Taleb says people tend to explain random events as non-random. And that is where we often go wrong.

To support his idea, Taleb goes through variou events in history. For example, he explains that even 50:50 bets like tossing a coin have various unusual and counter-intuitive distributions.

What is the lesson? Nothing is as concrete as it seems. In all walks of life, we must discount for randomness.

[From the great books  series. Also read The Success Manual - Encyclopedia of advice