Antifragile

Талеб — третью книгу насилующий небольшой набор (довольно разумных, здесь без возражений) тезисов путающийся в собственной логике шарлатан. Для улучшения опыта рекомендую выпивать каждый раз, когда он использует для подкрепления очередного своего наблюдения умозаключения, опирающиеся на ранее описанные им же типичные логические ошибки. Hard mode: почитать хотя бы, скажем, Голдакра про фармакологию перед тем, как взяться за соответствующую главу Antifragile, чтобы примерно оценить, насклько Талеб охотно рассуждает о вещах, о которых не имеет даже поверхностного представления (будут и другие возможности).

Как шарлатан Талеб, впрочем, хорош: мало кто способен с таким напором внушать клиенту чувство собственной исключительной сообразительности и незамутнённости. С нужной интонацией нашептанное на ухо "мы-то с тобой, читатель, не такие" — мощнейший инструмент, каждому хочется видеть насквозь некомпетентность учёных и экономистов. Талеб не отказывает себе и в удовольствии перечислить, кажется, все случаи, когда он (вероятней всего, по случайности) оказывался в чём-то прав, а эксперты в области — не слишком. Интересней было бы однажды ознакомиться со списком обратных ситуаций, но такое вряд ли хорошо продается.

Best idea in this book: consider the downside as well as the upside, and systemic perverse incentives can largely be corrected by ensuring decision-makers have skin in the game. For these ideas, read Taleb's other book called "Skin in the Game" and throw this one in the trash.

Every real-world example he gives of something "anti-fragile" could be considered simply "resilient," so I doubt that it exists outside of mythology, like his example of the Hydra, which grows 2 new heads for each decapitation it experiences.

Long discussion on how nonlinear systems are anti-fragile, but it's more descriptive than definitive. He deplores his favorite straw men "Soviet Harvard Academics" for not understanding these systems with curves. (They do; they formulated them.)

On the one hand, academics are all ivory tower fools who don't understand his real-world economics papers like all these business people seem too, and on the other hand, these business people don't get the value of his theoretical foresight like these academic people who invited him to speak seem to.

On the one hand, doctors who are in the trenches know way more than academics who never leave their labs who arrogantly think their ideas will somehow survive working on flesh and blood patients, and on the other hand these foolish old timers used to use leeches, for crying out loud, rather than understand the mechanisms and pathways of disease.

Vitamins aren't real, icing your broken nose is disrespectful to nature, and will you alternative medicine types stop calling me already -- "the approach of this book is ultra-Orthodox, ultra-rigorous, and ultra-scientific; certainly not in favor of alternative medicine."

He simultaneously champions evidence based medicine and decries past ignorant practices. You can't have the first without the other. Practical application of theory on a population and monitoring the results is how we learn what works and what doesn't. If you are attempting the visceral experimentation he advocates, you'll inevitably find something that doesn't work and is in fact harmful 20 years down the line. There literally no other way to "just know" what the best way is, like he implies.

The only takeaway here is this book is a great example of ego justification.

Awesome book. It alleviated some of my scariest anxieties.

Future anxiety. Before I read it I thought I would miss something new if I’m not going to read about new shiny things every day. Turns out, new developments are not that important. People cannot solve the same problems for centuries, so it’s better to read classics to anticipate future.

Health anxiety. Health is complex. Doctors don’t know much about it and almost always create problems on the long run. Well known example is antibiotics. Also when you think you’re so tired you gonna die you’re not even close to dying. It boosted my productivity.

Before the book I wasn’t sure why I don’t like government, education system and media. Turns out they’re ruled by fragilistas. That’s why those institutions produce so much bullshit.

The book made me realize that life gets much easier and better when you deliberately remove stuff from it. It doesn’t get better if you patch it constantly. Sure, you’re busy upgrading your lifestyle and you even might acquire comfort. But comfort kills people.

It takes time for the antifragility concept to sink in. The author is very repetitive from time to time. That’s why I put 4 out of 5 stars. But it’s an eye-opening book with unique voice. Definitely worth reading.

Quotes

At first I wasn't sure what to make of this book, but I suppose that's understandable, what with me not having read Taleb's previous work, that is, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Eventually, I came to be convinced that this book is, without a doubt, one of the most brilliant, most intelligent analyses of our economic society, of risk, personal as well as systemic, that I've read in a long, long time.

To be fair, I do not understand the full implication of the message, of what fragility vs antifragility entails, and I will be reading this book again soon, because --- there is so much to gain by understanding the principle.

Basically, there exists in the world today, those things that suffer from stress and damage, which Taleb calls "fragile": you drop a glass, it breaks; mechanics in general. And then there exists other things, those that suffer the damage, and not only do they recover from the damage, they grow stronger: for example, the body, muscles, organic material.

Apply this principle and analyze your surroundings, that's what Taleb does. It's brilliant!

Do read.

I could not point to a worse book that I have read.

The author is disorganized and throws a bunch of random factoids together with an unconvincing unifying theme. The lack of clarity in thinking is reminiscent of the kind of pseudo-intellectual numerology or fact-correlating that you find in works of fiction, but it is made even worse by the fact that the author seems to have a long list of axes to grind, and fills the book with petty name calling. Why is he so obsessed with the "soviet-harvard complex"?

I have the impression that good reviews of this book must come from people who felt they were supposed to "get it", but I think there is nothing to "get" in the book, starting from the introduction of a new word "antifragile", an awkward word to describe as a single phenomenon something that remains unconvincing.

As a saving grace: the author clearly has a vast culture, and a few factoids were cute when taken individually, like his pointing out that Homer used similes to describe the color of the sea because Greek at his time did not have a word for "blue". Still, I would prefer to slog through a bulleted list of factoids than to read them in his "I'm grinding an axe" framework. Reading random Wikipedia pages would be a better use of time.

For people who know Italian, here is a fantasy of how to treat people who write such poor and pretentious works -- a film critic is forced to listen to someone reading his critique:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruv2MJQ66MU