Taleb can write so originally in part because he has such a different background than the typical authors of these sorts of books. He isn’t involved in academia except at the peripheral level and he left big-company-land many years ago. Neither is he a journalist under pressure to publish. He has the money and motivation to just think and read and talk to people he wants to and tell us what he has learnt. This seems to be all he wants to do.
His originality probably owes as much to his being a born contrarian. He likes to be clear about who and what he loves and hates. He seems, for example, to really like Brooklyn, given how often he uses Brooklyn-type characters and locutions to make his points. I do, too- —and would agree that Brooklyn is as good a place as Singapore to make the case for antifragility. In the “hate” category fall economists, traders, pundits of all kinds, central planners—and a little more generally, people from Harvard. Apologies to my hosts here! I have the powerful sense that he welcomes all comers.
via Nassim Taleb’s Cure for Fragility – Larry Prusak – Harvard Business Review.