Category Archives: Haters

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: My Letter Addressing the Guardian’s Distortions (2009)

Leave a reply

From 2009, revisited in context of recent Guardian reviews.

I used to think that the US press was guilty of distortions. Recent events changed my mind, as UK anti-Cameron papers tried to cut and paste from my talk to weaken him by trying to demonize me. The problem is that they got my ideas backwards on every single point. Such lack of ethics, I am certain, would have never happened in the US. Here is my letter to the Guardian:

***

Dear sirs,

I am extremely honored to see my conversation with MP David Cameron at the RSA so repeatedly covered in your paper. However I was astonished by the representations that you made as they were in complete reverse to my positions on three subjects: the environment, market crashes, and taxation of the rich…

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb: My Letter Addressing the Guardian’s Distortions.

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – digested read | Books | The Guardian

1 Reply

Forget everything you ever learned from Harvard drones and Nobel laureates, for in them lies no salvation. They think only in the sort of teleological heuristic iatrogenics that would appeal to a Seneca or a Nero. The world is really composed of Triads: the Fragile, the Robust and the Antifragile. Now abideth these three. And the greatest of these is the Antifragile. Don’t just take it from me. Look at this bar chart that shows how everyone else is very stupid, and I am right about everything. Case proved.

A week or so ago, I was bench-pressing 250kg in the luxury gym in the basement of my Manhattan condo, when I was interrupted by Nelson Mandela who wanted to know why I kept repeating the triadic dualistic mantra of fragile and antifragile. “Dats simpul,” I replied, using the voice of Fat Tony from Brooklyn, a character I created who never fails to make me laugh out loud. Though he may not have the same effect on you. “Becoz I’ve nuttin more to say and 400 pages to say it.”

via Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – digested read | Books | The Guardian.

Falkenblog: Taleb Mishandles Fragility

Leave a reply

Christmas traditions have gone from stockings and exchanging gifts, to fruitcakes, bad sweaters, NBA games, and now Taleb books, a sign that perhaps the Mayan return isn’t so much an apocalypse but rather a mercy killing. Taleb is one of many best-selling authors I don’t enjoy (Tom Friedman, Robert Kiyosaki, Snooki), but as he is prolix, pretentious, petulant and clueless, I enjoy commenting on his latest blather (my review of Black Swan here, Bed of Procrustes here).

His latest book Antifragile is driven by his discovery that there is not an English word for the opposite of fragile, which he thinks could not be ‘robust’ (this neologism is one of the few new ideas presented in this book, not that I think we need more new Taleb ideas). Fragile things lose a lot of value when mishandled, ‘anti-fragile’ things increase a lot in value when mishandled. He thinks this is very profound and therefore needs a book. The problem is that mishandle implies an adverse effect by definition, which is why there isn’t a word for something that goes up in value when you mishandle it.

via Falkenblog: Taleb Mishandles Fragility.

Twitter / nntaleb: Yes He should put back whatever he had after disclaimer. Nothing wrong with parody.

Leave a reply

There’s more to this, much of which may have been deleted, but a little shyte storm broke out this morning on Twitter around some ”favorite passages”, ostensibly from NNT’s new book, Antifragile (that was the context of the blog post) published by Joshua Brown at ‘the Reformed Broker’. The post has since been removed, probably at the behest of NNT’s London publisher’s lawyer. If you’re quick however, you can catch it in Google’s cache. A couple of them made me laugh out loud.

In the end, NNT invited @ReformedBroker to repost them with a disclaimer.

Nassim N. Taleb Nassim N. Taleb ‏ Yes He should put back whatever he had after disclaimer. Nothing wrong with parody.

via Twitter / nntaleb: @foxjust @ReformedBroker ….

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

Leave a reply

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.