Nassim Nicholas Taleb is clearly worth listening to. His idea of antifragility is useful. But he seems determined to alienate people. His book, Antifragile, is sprawling and confrontational. He uses it to settle a long list of scores with famous names. Those who disagree are not merely wrong. Instead, they are portrayed as cartoon villains bent on the destruction of everything good in the world.
Does He Have An Editor?
Taleb’s other quirks include an unwillingness to listen to editors. Unsurprisingly, his book could really do with cuts to its most self-indulgent material. He isn’t a fan of modernity. He also has a fascination with ancient heroism. Apparently, we should be more like the characters in the Iliad, although I’m pretty sure Taleb thinks Achilles was a wimp who was too willing to compromise. To be fair, the random crankiness, the attacks on academics, and lack of self-awareness was pretty entertaining. Perhaps his oversized persona is but a carefully cultivated act to seem more interesting. (For soccer fans, I always assumed José Mourinho was just the character the manager played. It is increasing dawning on me that may not be the case. The line between playing a challenging character in public and being a bit of an arse can be hard to see).
Antifragility
Taleb explains the concept of anti-fragility. This is the opposite of fragility. He notes that this isn’t robustness. Fragility is when something suffers from variance/change. Thus, a glass is fragile. Change its circumstances suddenly, drop it from a table, and it suffers. A robust thing will not be impacted, it stands up to strains and stresses well. Yet, a robust thing doesn’t gain from adversity. On the other hand, anti-fragile things benefit from stresses and strains. Anti-fragile things have excellent optionality and profit greatly from extreme events.
The book contains some great ideas. Taleb deserves credit for raising interest in variance and in non-normal distributions. Too often we focus only on averages or assume a normal distribution without much thought to what we are doing. For raising important points I’d buy Taleb a beer if I saw him. Apparently, he doesn’t drink anything but coffee, water, and wine. Anything else is a bit too modern for his tastes.
For more on academics who have challenging personalities see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Read: Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012) Antifragile, Random House.