This is my first Nassim Taleb book. I had heard of the Black Swan and that he was a bit of an asshole, but had no idea what I was getting into. This guy is like Junkrat from Overwatch — he can’t go two minutes without hurling grenades.
At one level, it’s refreshing. Very few people have the chutzpah to write how he does. Folks have too many friends in their field and don’t want to burn bridges to consulting fees. His intellectual confidence, anti-socialization and pleasure in calling other people idiots are useful to readers as they force us to question things that really deserve more scrutiny than we generally make time for. I enjoy reading autodidacts like Taleb who have different intellectual inputs and apply a fresher lens.
Taleb, who brags about his “fuck you money,” leaves no white collar profession unscathed. Bureaucrats are all polish no substance. Economists have too much confidence in their models and end up causing financial crises. Statisticians can’t understand states. Every academic suffers from “domain bias,” where they are incapable of generalizing principles outside of their area of expertise. He only has respect for the “doers” who rarely get glorified because they can’t/don’t waste their time memorializing their accomplishments in print.
The Sherman’s March he takes through contemporary knowledge is reasonably compelling. I now will be more skeptical of interventionist medical advice and statistical significance, and will better incorporate catastrophic downside potential when thinking about risk.
But his modus operandi doesn’t do any favors to the affirmative arguments he puts forward. The arrogance that gives him the confidence to take on the world doesn’t give me faith that he, alone among intellectuals, does his homework and has the answers. This is the sort of book (like Nietzsche) that is really dangerous to give to a teenager as it can turn them into a jerk who thinks she alone understands what makes the world tick.
In the end, Antifragile is much more valuable for the questions it challenges us to raise than the prescriptions it writes.
A note on style: he clearly appreciates the writing and wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans and models his style on greats like Seneca, Cicero and Nietzsche. He aspires to write in a straightforward, occasionally aphoristic manner full of anecdotes and asides. I think the brain is much more comfortable engaging with complicated thoughts through this type of writing than contemporary multi-paragraph-long points that make sure to hedge on every conceivable angle. What he does is much closer to conversation, which is how we evolved to communicate. But on the ‘mess — great table talk’ spectrum Antifragile resides far on the left.
So who should read it?
People who are interested in a reasonably compelling theory that they can apply to lots of domains. As a prerequisite, you have to be able to find a blowhard at least mildly amusing and wade through a lot of his non sequiturs.
So what is his main idea anyway?
Antifragile is the idea that certain ideas/people/systems/markets/states benefit from shock in the inverse way that fragile things are harmed by them. “Post-traumatic growth.” Nature’s evolutionary process is the prime example.
He does a pretty decent job of summarizing his book in a few sentences. “Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty. The glass on the table is short volatility.”
The rest of the work is filled with a whole bunch of chapters that repeat themselves and don’t really tie together. Occasionally he presents a real gem.
Since Taleb didn’t take the time to edit and streamline his thoughts, it’s hard for me to find the motivation either. Below his most interesting beats.
- Having enough self-control to speak softly causes people to pay extra attention. The mafia don doesn’t shout, he whispers.
- Decisionmakers (CEOs, politicians, economists) should always have skin in the game and be exposed to catastrophic downside risk.
- Worst historical cases, which many use to model out future outcomes, were often the historic low when they happened.
- When some systems are stuck at an impasse, only randomness can set them free. He referenced Athenian composition of politics, I thought D&D. Also divination was a way to force you to choose in a tricky situation without spending the whole time second-guessing yourself.
- Inefficient state planning, like in the USSR food system, built in buffers and helped save post-soviet countries from starvation after the empire collapsed.
- Regicide was like tapping on thermometer to reset it. Once kings started living longer and hardened their bodyguards, states lost a valuable restabilization mechanism.
- Corporations don’t give out bonuses to employees who act defensively and preserve what’s already working. They have poorly designed payouts that incentivize workers who make loud changes that may work out great but also could prove disastrous. “Survival over success.”
- Start each day expecting the worst thing to happen, and resign yourself to it, so that when it doesn’t it’s all gravy.
- “Separate main course from dessert”: work intensely for a few hours then relax until you wanna work again.
- Phenomenology over theories: things are so complicated (the economy, biological systems) that the theories we come up with to explain them can never be all that good. Better to observe and trust in experience over theories.
- Bureaucrats are selected on halo effects of polish because there are no market forces at play and no objective measures of success.
- You gotta “figure out how to put the wheel on the luggage.” Aztecs had toys for children with wheels but never applied them to actual work.
- Rarely does invention come from theory to practice. More often it’s the tinkerers who come up with the big breakthroughs (see the Industrial Revolution and random British clerics and civil servants who had enough of a salary to spend their time playing with technology). Academic researchers are so focused on finding their results and winning grant money that they tend to miss the anomalies that don’t fit in the theories.
- What one needs to know for a profession to be really great at it is far away from the standard corpus.
- “What is not intelligible to me isn’t not necessarily unintelligent” — Neitzsche
- He cracks on Peter Orzag for in 06 saying that Fannie May was 100% safe and then two years later getting a job on the Obama admin. It does seem pretty hard to get disqualified for public life for anything but a private scandal.
- Knowledge grows more from subtraction than addition as once we’re pretty convinced something is wrong then it’s likely to stay wrong for awhile, but the converse isn’t necessarily the case.
- Obvious decisions don’t require more than one reason. If you feel yourself reaching for a second one, don’t do it.
- Since tech silicon valley people don’t appreciate culture, they don’t appreciate history, so will probably be pretty bad at predicting the future.
- The things that have been around the longest (forks, books) are likely to last the longest into the future. Also, books that are the oldest that people are still reading are way more likely to be good than your average well-regarded recent one.
- The reason we haven’t been able to find drugs that unconditionally make us feel better or healthier is because nature probably would have found it already.
- At one point he challenges Socrates to a debate.
This is the best mean review I came across. “ The problem, though, is that Taleb no longer writes from the perspective of the practitioner but of someone who has crossed over to live among the academics and wants to tell them what they are missing. He is now more like the nun with a racy past who lectures the rest of the convent about the meaning of sex: not much fun for anyone.”
Jackson Pollack’s Portrait and a Dream is probably the best take on how this book was organized.
Damn you made it this far? Ten points for you.