Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Neat idea, messy book.

… Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – review | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

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.

Riposte . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

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