Antifragility and opinions on Nassim Taleb

In My Humble Opinion
21

His own words are worse. (Antifragility)

“I once broke my nose walking… In the emergency room, the doctor and staff insisted I apply ice to my nose… In the middle of the pain, it hit me that the swelling Mother Nature gave me was most certainly not directly caused by the trauma. It seemed to me that it was an insult to Mother Nature to override her programmed reactions unless we had good reason to do so, backed by proper empiric testing to show we humans can do better… So I mumbled to the emergency room doctor whether he had any statistical evidence of benefits from applying ice to my nose or if it resulted from a naive version of an interventionalism.

His response was: “You have a nose the size of Boston and you are now interested in numbers?” I recall developing from his blurry remarks the thought that he had no answer.

Effectively, he had no answer, because as soon as I got to a computer, I was able to confirm that there is no compelling empirical evidence in favour of the reduction of swelling… it was pure sucker-rationalism in the mind of doctors… coupled with interventionalism, this need to do something, this defect of thinking that we knew better, and denigration of the unobserved… this confabulation plagues the entire history of medicine… the onus is on the doctors to show us why reducing fever is good, why eating breakfast before engaging in activity is healthy…”

  • the conclusion the swelling was not directly caused by the trauma is probably wrong; can we agree it is if there was a broken facial or nasal bone or bleeding beneath the skin or in the nose, caused by the fall?
  • he concludes the doctor had no answer, probably falsely, probably not fairly (is imagining an answer or not)
  • he confirms this based on his own computer, somehow; with good info? Because every doctor knows patients draw wrong conclusions from an Internet search all the time. Is swelling to the face after a fall the same as general swelling if you have to pull a dislocated nose back into place? Is the intervention “ice”, or ice plus pressure - a distinction important in the presence of bleeding…
  • elsewhere asking “what is the evidence?” is weak (climate change, thalidomide) if effects are small or slow
  • does “ice” help with pain? Is reduced swelling helpful to evaluate facial symmetry to estimate the likelihood of a broken bone, so which imaging test would be better?
  • most doctors would agree reducing fever is not that important, but breakfast has been studied at length with different conclusions for different situations - if you are hungry when you get up is it Mother Nature making you so?
22

However, I love his use of math - particularly when discussing risk and finance, his areas of greatest expertise. His ideas are interesting and broadly applicable, especially to business, though as above he works too hard sometimes to fit square pegs.

I think he is largely right about overprescription of statins in mild cases of cholesterol emus even if his examples are dated. He is right about doctors not having incentives to be humble, dependence on a apprentice model of education and many other things. But also some big misses, and no shortage of attitude he dislikes in others.

23

Taleb also weirdly thinks gym machines work the muscles but “do not work the skeleton”. Although many lifters like free weight exercises and dislike machines, some are excellent. He is correct that stressing bone makes it stronger. Some machines are still valuable adjuncts for weightlifting. Things like Smith machines and assisted chin-ups are very useful.

24

Fooled By Randomness is brilliant

Black Swan is ok.

I havent got round to the rest, but i fear they will be less and less of the goodness of FbR and more and more of the annoying bits of BS.

He is hilariously, heroically, thin skinned on twitter.

He has been mistaken by some as an alt-right guru like J-Pete, its quite gratifying to see him disappoint. Eg he is pro mask, pro vaccine, anti cryptocurrency, anti-Libertarianist, in favour of assuming the worst about climatr change.

25

I read the sample available on Amazon… and it has the same feel as Skin in the Game. It starts with repeating some myths about Croseus. It then moves on to a long-winded description of Nero Tulip, who I guess is supposed to be a semi-fictional version of Nassim Taleb.

Is the whole book this kind of thing? When I look at the points he’s trying to make across his writings, I think: ahh, this man is trying to be a clear thinker in a world of sloppiness. Most people go around ignorant of the limits of knowledge and the incentives that drive people, and Nassim is using his experience in the markets to demonstrate how the world often behaves otherwise.

And so I go in wanting to be convinced of these points. I want to see how real scenarios actually played out vs. what the players thought would happen, and also how that differs from the conventional interpretation of what happened. I want to see data and rigorous analysis of these events.

But all I see so far is, basically, fiction. Just-so stories, fictional characters, narrow interpretations of mundane events, and so on. It’s not remotely convincing, and most of it isn’t even interesting. Am I somehow missing all the good stuff in the books? They don’t seem to rise to the levels of, say, Freakonomics or Guns, Germs and Steel, which were themselves sloppy, but at least paid lip-service to reality.

26

I like Antifragile and Fooled by Randomness. I found Black Swan very challenging to finish due to his attitude even if his ideas seem to me often correct. I think he is a brilliant thinker with many good ideas and many ridiculous ones.

Philosophically, Taleb is a bit of a kindred spirit to me. But his attitude is very different, is often prickly and unintentionally funny. His message is consistent but most complete in Antifragile. There will always be a lot of sand mixed in with his pearls - it is who he is.

Examples of BS:

“Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter - it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity and purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all - period.”

“Few can grasp the logical consequence… one should lead a life where procrastination is good, as a naturalistic form of decision making. I select the writing of the passages of this book by procrastination. If I defer writing a section, it must be eliminated. This is simple ethics: why should I try to fool people by writing about a subject for which I feel no natural drive? A friend who writes books remarked that painters like painting but authors like having written. I suggested he stop writing, for his sake and the sake of his readers.” Thanks, friend!

27

He seems to have some grasp of a problem but without quite enough self-reflection to determine the cause. There is something wrong with “let me lecture you on this thing I learned 5 minutes ago from Wikipedia” (I can’t claim to be totally innocent of that myself, though I don’t write books). But that’s unrelated to a subject being interesting or not. If he’s ignoring a subject because he feels unqualified to speak on it, that’s certainly a good thing; if he leaves out important elements because he doesn’t find them inherently interesting, that’s bad.

Anyway, I guess what I’m looking for is some kind of rigor. Of course, that’s lacking in all sorts of pop philosophy books, but I vaguely hoped that Taleb’s work would be better. Pop science is also not great but it has the excuse that it is done with rigor elsewhere, and if I’m interested in more details I can find them. It’s not clear that Talab’s ideas are on solid footing in any venue.

28

Taleb always has a long bibliography at the end of his books. Of course a work is more coherent if the thesis is formed based on deep knowledge and acumen. But it is pompous to say one never needs to look up anything or confirm some forgotten trivia. There is a sense he judges others for this. In the end, the work will either stand up or not and it just doesn’t matter.

Taleb’s use of math is generally (not always) good and his ideas with regards to finance and economics are fairly coherent and have the ring of truth. He tends to broadly apply the same logic to spheres further from his expertise - and deserves credit for these generalizations - with varying success and some confabulation. Like Jordan Peterson, he uses a number of interesting examples from classics and philosophy. However, Taleb’s uses are more interesting and obscure. Sometimes they even prove his point.

I could live without the Fat Tony and Nero stuff. Like Trump, a lot of Taleb’s emphasis is on what people he respects tell him. Taleb is very proud of the fact he started deadlifting moderate weights and “now looks like a bodyguard” under a 60 year old trainer with typically dated fitness views. He is clearly the source for some of his health beliefs.

29

Maybe your first Taleb is the best. Like the first piece of KFC when you are hungry.

30

Maybe. But his views are consistent throughout everything he has written.

31

It’s also nonsense. Never start by assuming you know everything you need to know - sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know until you start looking. Besides, there’s too much knowledge out there for any one man to hold in his head.

32

I think Antifragility was one of the most exasperating books I’ve ever read. There’s clearly some good ideas in there, that might’ve made for some interesting Aeon articles or captivating TED talks, but they’re buried behind so much anecdotes about how Nassim Nicholas Taleb is better than everybody else at what they’re doing, the experience of reading it is sort of like a mother trying to enjoy an afternoon’s reading only for her five year old to keep trying to get her attention—yes, dear, I’m looking, yes, very nice, yes, you’re very clever. What’s odd is that it’s clear Taleb actually is very clever—so why that weird insecurity?

I mean, take this bit:

I started, around the age of thirteen, to keep a log of my reading hours, shooting for between thirty and sixty a week, a practice I’ve kept up for a long time. I read the likes of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bishop Bossuet, Stendhal, Dante, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Céline, Schultz, Zweig (didn’t like), Henry Miller, Max Brod, Kafka, Ionesco, the surrealists, Faulkner, Malraux (along with other wild adventurers such as Conrad and Melville; the first book I read in English was Moby-Dick) and similar authors in literature, many of them obscure, and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Jaspers, Husserl, Lévi-Strauss, Levinas, Scholem, Benjamin, and similar ones in philosophy because they had the golden status of not being on the school program, and I managed to read nothing that was prescribed by school so to this day I haven’t read Racine, Corneille, and other bores. One summer I decided to read the twenty novels by Émile Zola in twenty days, one a day, and managed to do so at great expense. Perhaps joining an underground anti-government group motivated me to look into Marxist studies, and I picked up the most about Hegel indirectly, mostly through Alexandre Kojève.
When I decided to come to the United States, I repeated, around the age of eighteen, the marathon exercise by buying a few hundred books in English (by authors ranging from Trollope to Burke, Macaulay, and Gibbon, with Anaïs Nin and other then fashionable authors de scandale), not showing up to class, and keeping the thirty- to sixty-hour discipline.

Do we really need this stack of books thrown at us? What could it conceivably elicit in the reader but blunt force trauma? Throughout, I kept looking for some hint of self-awareness, some sort of irony, but for all I can tell, he’s completely sincere in what he says. So eventually, I decided to take him up on this bit of advice—provided, again, in apparently perfect sincerity, in the same book containing the above bit:

Say you run into a person during a boat cruise. What would you do if he started boasting of his accomplishments, telling you how great, rich, tall, impressive, skilled, famous, muscular, well educated, efficient, and good in bed he is, plus other attributes? You would certainly run away (or put him in contact with another talkative bore to get rid of both of).

And decided his writing just wasn’t for me.

33

Sigh. I agree that this can be exhausting. I had enormous difficulty even finishing Black Swan because of this effluvium, which is more frequent than in Antifragility. It took me many tries.

I think the ideas are clever even if I wish they were differently phrased. I know many very smart people. Some are indeed prickly but most have at least moments of modesty, and many are very likeable. I still think it is worth reading, as Taleb is a unique thinker.

34

Some people are good thinkers, but poor communicators. It’s one thing to reason things out in your head to your own satisfaction; it’s another thing to word a concept in such a way that other people can easily grasp it. I would rate Taleb as one of the best thinkers of his generation; but he is woefully in need of a good editor who can prune the verbal thicket.

35

I certainly wouldn’t. He’s good at packaging up stuff others have known about for decades into bites digestible for people who mistake being an ass on social media for intelligence.

36

I try and read widely, and often prefer (first) books people may have spent years perfecting to whatever slapdash anything on social media. I’ve never seen Taleb debating or a podcast or social media and do not want to.

No doubt I am only exposed to a very small fraction of thought. But I have never heard anyone express many of the ideas Taleb does and these are very consistent throughout his work. I enjoy some of the anecdotes. I think some of the ideas are really quite clever, and others less so.

I could live without characters like Fat Tony and the rah-rah stuff. The part where he discusses the modest amount of weight he can deadlift, and so assumes fellow academics view him as having a physique “like a bodyguard”, is kind of weird, but there you go. I think everyone should weight lift. But I do not assume it impresses most people much.

37

What I find intriguing is that many of the greatest thinkers develop their ideas through critical self-examination (Montaigne, Marc Aurel…), while Taleb’s can often be read more as originating in self-justification (or at least, that’s the impression I got from Antifragility): not everyone praises his books—means they’re great, because the best books are always the controversial ones! He didn’t really do well at school—means he’s too smart, and got his education on the street, gaming the system as he went, because formal education is for suckers! His paleo-diet is the best, his exercise regimen superior to that recommended by fitness coachs… That there are actually genuine ideas and insights emerging from this blinkered self-regard is perhaps an instance of the lex Luthoris:

Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.

38

Guess you never saw the old Bazooka Joe comics when he was still named after Borodino.