I really appreciate his books, The Black Swan and Antifragile particularly, though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable.
However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable.
[1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.
Have you read his books (not just the summary but all the chapters)? While he has good points, he is so egotistical, self-absorbed, and full of pseudo-scientific theories (e.g. that one should go between gorging themselves on food and fasting) that it makes it hard to actually extract out the good parts.
> At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive.
He did, it's called "The Bed of Procrustes". I quite enjoyed it, there's quite a few brilliant thoughts there, even though they're sprinkled between countless cheap shots against his enemies.
He has gone a bit off the deep end recently. I guess too much arguing with opponents radicalised him, similar to Dawkins.
IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an easy, entertaining read.
I've read _The Black Swan_ and was disappointed. He repeats the same concept (that could have been easily expressed in a short article) again and again, while bragging about how clever, cool and refined he is.
>>though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books
True, he has, but his thoughts on randomness and such are very important. Yet, they don't seem to get through to the zeitgeist. In my view, he needs to publish a few more books on the subject to emphasise the point even more.
He reminds me of a professor that's always looking down on everyone because no one is smart enough. But, I'm a fan of his work and many of his views.
Taleb's approach is to put BS-vendors on full blast, especially if he sees them prominently spreading bad ideas and acting in bad faith. It's a service to all of us. The intellectual sphere is crowded enough already without the pundit class spreading misinformation.
Taleb holds that essentially all journalists are fools, and the articles they publish are "noise". He says "to cure yourself of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers". There's wisdom in this: the importance of the news of the day can't be immediately apprehended. What seems important at the time can quickly fade into irrelevance. Larger stories are often completely missed or gotten totally wrong.
Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that no one but him can figure out the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a twitter war with JK Rowling!
The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he knows everything.
He totally lost me when he started talking about Michael Flynn being one of the great military minds or praising The Mooch's rant and "being direct, natural, and nononsense".
I love Nassim Taleb as an academic and philosopher. I think he has a Peter Thiel like quality of being able to thinking differently, but in a very applicable way.
Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault.
If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible formats.
I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if you had read the entire book.
I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real analysis courses.
If you really want to read his books, then start backwards.
Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been writing about since the black Swan.
As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective, then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options.
His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to
1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years
2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets
we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for the long term success of the fund.
I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I couldn't help reply to your comment about starting backwards: I completely disagree. Fooled by Randomness, in my opinion, is Taleb's seminal work. Reading it changed the course of career (I work in finance), much more so than Antifragile or Black Swan (even though both books are excellent).
Or bonuses should be based on what happens during a long period of time. Say you lead a company from 2015 to 2020, but your bonus is based on how well the company does from 2020 through 2025. And if the company fails before you get your bonus, too bad for you.
I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and podcasts to be valuable.
Jeff Deist, the author of this article is a crypto white nationalist. You can pick up a hint of this from the article above,
"He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture matter"
A quote from another article,
"Jeff Deist, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian think tank for promoting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and the Austrian School of economics, said of the Alt-right that he found their writings "interesting...and somewhat refreshing".[20] In 2017, Deist concluded a speech at the Mises Institute titled 'For a New Libertarian' with the words, "In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."[21]
Why is he a 'white nationalist' and not just a 'nationalist'?
Do you have any indication that, so long as people conform to his idea of what his country's culture should be, that he wouldn't accept black, asian, etc people?
Thanks for bringing that up, the idea of questioning the objectives and leanings of the ”Mises Institute” in general, and the author in particular, didn't occur to me (doh!).
(N.B. I'm not the original poster of the article.)
The Black Swan has a good point to make about reliance on over-simplified mathematical models, but Taleb's macho anti-intellectualism is ultimately nihilistic since he denies even the possibility of achieving a deeper mathematical understanding of risk. But what I really have a problem with is that he has created a band of idiot Twitter acolytes who can be counted on to heap brainless abuse at anyone who Taleb chooses to disagree with, which these days seems to be almost everyone with even slightly diverging views to his. He will not attempt reasonable debate, especially when he is faced with superior erudition: in this regard Mary Beard is only the latest of his many victims. The guy is a pure and simple thug.
...which is not actually that great for any healthy male that trains, but considering he got into it late, it's pretty good and probably better than 98% of males his age.
[+] [-] qubex|8 years ago|reply
However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he's been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I'm more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable.
[1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.
[+] [-] jdavis703|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambivalence|8 years ago|reply
He did, it's called "The Bed of Procrustes". I quite enjoyed it, there's quite a few brilliant thoughts there, even though they're sprinkled between countless cheap shots against his enemies.
[+] [-] RachelF|8 years ago|reply
IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an easy, entertaining read.
[+] [-] paozac|8 years ago|reply
One of the most obnoxious writers I know of.
[+] [-] zenogais|8 years ago|reply
See this wikipedia page for a list of all such authors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|8 years ago|reply
True, he has, but his thoughts on randomness and such are very important. Yet, they don't seem to get through to the zeitgeist. In my view, he needs to publish a few more books on the subject to emphasise the point even more.
He reminds me of a professor that's always looking down on everyone because no one is smart enough. But, I'm a fan of his work and many of his views.
[+] [-] Tycho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hsdhdfhhasdf77|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] emtel|8 years ago|reply
Buuuuuut apparently what Taleb means is that no one but him can figure out the importance of things immediately. The guy tweets, apparently believing that he understands the lasting importance of what he's tweeting about. And hey, maybe he does... except, among other things, he's in (or was in) a twitter war with JK Rowling!
The guy is a loon who has figured a lot of things out, and now believes he knows everything.
[+] [-] cmac2992|8 years ago|reply
Seems like a smart guy but...
[+] [-] chollida1|8 years ago|reply
Nassim Taleb the author though I really can't get into, and to be fair he's had so much success that this is probably my fault.
If you want to get the most out of his work then read his medium blog. Most of his pieces are written in easily digestible formats.
https://medium.com/@nntaleb
I've re-started trying to read the Black Swan about 10 times and IMHO if you just read the first 3 chapters then you'll get about 95% of what you would if you had read the entire book.
I think the problem with his books that I have is that he considers himself not just an author but a modern day philosopher, and with that comes a level of rigor in his writing that brings me back to my measure theory and real analysis courses.
If you really want to read his books, then start backwards.
Antifragile is awesome, but still very wordy, and builds on top of all his other works. It almost seems to be the culmination of the idea's he's been writing about since the black Swan.
As a side note, for anyone who wants to learn about options trading with a focus on how a trader would view them, ie from a mathematical perspective, then check out one of his first books...... Dynamic Hedging of Options.
http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471152803...
As a second side note........
His latest concept of “Skin in the game” is the best form of risk control that we've found for reigning in traders. Once traders are required to
1) keep the vast majority of their bonus in the fund for a few years
2) take part of their bonus in the form of non liquid securities if they want to hold more than a certain percentage of their portfolio in non liquid assets
we have found they pay alot more attention to the liquidity of their portfolio and the long term profitability of their portfolio, both of which are good for the long term success of the fund.
[+] [-] hoodwink|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|8 years ago|reply
I haven't read his books but find his ideas as presented in videos and podcasts to be valuable.
[+] [-] maxthegeek1|8 years ago|reply
"He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture matter"
A quote from another article,
"Jeff Deist, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian think tank for promoting Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and the Austrian School of economics, said of the Alt-right that he found their writings "interesting...and somewhat refreshing".[20] In 2017, Deist concluded a speech at the Mises Institute titled 'For a New Libertarian' with the words, "In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."[21]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolibertarianism#United_Sta...
Note that "blood and soil" refers to the nazi phrase "blut and boden".
[+] [-] oh_sigh|8 years ago|reply
Do you have any indication that, so long as people conform to his idea of what his country's culture should be, that he wouldn't accept black, asian, etc people?
[+] [-] qubex|8 years ago|reply
(N.B. I'm not the original poster of the article.)
[+] [-] questerzen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ukj|8 years ago|reply
Mary Beard is respectable, well educated and gracious. Taleb is right.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blueyes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grey-area|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oh_sigh|8 years ago|reply
...which is not actually that great for any healthy male that trains, but considering he got into it late, it's pretty good and probably better than 98% of males his age.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rtx|8 years ago|reply