Tag Archives: book review

Taleb Pegs Greenspan, Stiglitz as ‘Fragilistas’ – Bloomberg

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He names names: Alan Greenspan, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Friedman, Robert Rubin and Alan Blinder, among others, receive very harsh treatment, some for blindness, others for ethical lapses. They all fit his definition of the “fragilista”: “Someone who causes fragility because he thinks he understands what’s going on.”

“I do not have a political affiliation,” Taleb asserts after blasting both parties, complaining that it’s hard to fit his ideas “within the current U.S. political discourse.” He writes as a philosopher and a prophet, though he’s mainly a prophet in the sense that Cassandra was.

via Taleb Pegs Greenspan, Stiglitz as ‘Fragilistas’ – Bloomberg.

Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Guardian

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The author of The Black Swan has now written a baggy, dispiriting, antisocial mess of a book. By David Runciman

If the idea is nice and neat, however, the book that houses it is just the opposite. It is a big, baggy, sprawling mess. Taleb seems to have decided not just to explain his idea but also to try to exemplify it. One of his bugbears is the fragility of most of what passes for “knowledge” – especially the kind produced by academics – which he thinks is so hung up on order and completeness that it falls apart at the first breath of disruption. So he has gone for deliberate disorder: Antifragile jumps around from aphorism to anecdote to technical analysis, interspersed with a certain amount of hectoring encouragement to the reader to keep up. The aim, apparently, is to show how much more interesting an argument can be if it resists being pinned down.

There are two problems with this. First, the book is very hard going. Everything is taken to link to everything else but nothing is ever followed through. Taleb despises mere “theorists” but still aspires to produce a theory of everything. So what we get are lots of personal reminiscences buttressed by the ideas of the few thinkers he respects, almost all of whom happen to be his friends. The result is both solipsistic and ultimately dispiriting. Reading this book is the intellectual equivalent of having to sit patiently while someone shows you their holiday snaps.

via Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – review | Books | The Guardian.

Letter to the Editor of the Guardian Book Review Section

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The Reviewer was not offended enough

Sirs,

I am extremely flattered by Mr Runciman’ s anger and sorry for the pain he got reading my book (as an academic and political scientist). But I am certain that he barely skimmed the book, as evidenced by his comparison of cab drivers with stockbrokers (stockbrokers have volatile careers) and his misdefinition of the proposed heuristics (heuristics need to be convex, so he missed the central idea of the book). Given Mr Runciman’s ideas about the state he should have been considerably more annoyed with Antifragile and much more offended by its contents.

The book deserves an angrier reviewer (and perhaps a more intuitive one). The next time, please pick an academic political scientist who has more time to read.

Best regards,

N. N. Taleb

Updated 11/24/12

PS: There are 607 references to convexity (and related concepts such as optionality and asymmetry) in the book which I said is the central idea.

NOTE (NOT IN LETTER). I’ve had >1000 bad reviews over time. This ranks as the second most stupid reviewer. The most stupid one was an economist.

via Untitled Document.

Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | The Sunday Times

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I t would be easy to think, from his place in the culture, that ­Nassim Taleb writes those ­Malcolm Gladwell-style big ideas books that have been such a recent vogue: slick expansions of journalism with a self-help edge. But Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, is much, much more eccentric and, in a way, more interesting than that.

A mixture of parables, personal anecdote, ad hominem attacks, pseudo-Socratic dialogues involving an imaginary figure called Fat Tony, aphorisms and homespun philosophy ranging across subjects as diverse as finance, medicine, urban planning, political theory and how best to achieve an ­awesomely ripped set of abs, Antifragile reads like the ramblings of a clever, slightly cracked and intensely chippy autodidact — which is, it turns sout, exactly what it is.

via Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | The Sunday Times.
HatTip to Dave Lull

Randomness, probability and uncertainty: Stress best | The Economist

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Indeed, Mr Taleb thinks the big mistake is trying too hard to avoid shocks. Long periods of stability allow risks to accumulate until there is a major disaster; volatility means that things do not get too far out of kilter. In the economy cutting interest rates at the first sign of weakness stores up more trouble for later. In markets getting rid of speculators means prices are more stable in general but any fluctuations cause greater panic. In political systems the stability brought by regimes such as Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt was artificial; without any effective way for people to express dissent, change leads to collapse.

The principle applies to career choices too. An apparently secure job within a large company disguises a dependency on a single employer and the risk that unemployment will cause a very sudden and steep loss of income. Professions that have more variable earnings, like taxi-driving or prostitution, are less vulnerable to really big shocks. They also use volatility as information: if a cabbie is in a part of town where there are no fares, he heads to a different area.

via Randomness, probability and uncertainty: Stress best | The Economist.
HatTip to Dave Lull!