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.