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3.55 AVERAGE
3.55 AVERAGE
Nassim Taleb always gives you a bright and different perspective on how there is more rationality and numbers behind our behaviour and decissions, even if we as individuals we are more subjecttives there are reason an logic that can be approach with math models
It was a boring read. I took this book up because it was Papercut Book club's "book of the month".
the concept is interesting but I feel the concept was stretched and elaborated ,only to turn it into a book.
the concept is interesting but I feel the concept was stretched and elaborated ,only to turn it into a book.
dark
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced
This book probably would have been better as a 15-30 page paper instead of a full fledged book. The entire book felt more like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's rantings against the world that he would loosely tie back into morality and progress though "Skin in the Game". Some of the concepts seemed new or interesting, but the major premise is covered by the introduction and everything that follows was a waste of time.
My review of this will resemble that of Antifragile a lot. Seems like I have a love/hate reader relation with Taleb. On some things I absolutely agree, on the others I couldn’t disagree more. I think it’s a book you should read. But don’t go about following it to the letter. Again I found it very funny how he accuses researchers cherry-picking cases to make examples and hand waving things that don’t fit the narrative away when he’s doing the exact same thing. Everyone he dislikes is an IYI or semi-intellectual. There’s no space for gray in his world, only black-and-white. I simply can’t endorse that kind of viewpoint.
A bit too much personal attacks (Pinker) . Sometimes the points could be made more directly. Fun to read and sometimes mind blowing. Sometimes I wanted to quit. 3.5.
I've preferred the black swann.
I've preferred the black swann.
Not quite the tour-de-force Antifragile is, SITG is primarily a coda for Taleb's incerto. A very compelling, hilarious coda.
Taleb has gone through a considerable transformation during these four books - becoming ever more outspoken against objects of deplorability, ever more outspoken of western political approaches, ever more outspoken of wahabism/salafism.
and i love him for it. He even takes the steps to push all the technical justification for his views on fat-tails into a big technical appendix - leaving more time for taleb to make his varied points.
He jokes, teases, and rewards the reader. Subtle nods to stories and aspects of previous works are enjoyed here. Its clear hes having a ton of fun with the writing.
However all of this makes this book not quite the standalone success the others are - it builds upon the other books in a way that cant be separated. Black swan, fooled, antifragile could all be read by someone in isolation. This book is too self referential for that. So for taleb-veterans only, and specifically you have to have read Antifragile.
Haters of taleb will still continue to hate. So-called experts of all fields, militarists, fools of the cult of scientism.
The biggest takeaways from this tome are the silver rule (do not do to others as you would not want them to do to you), and the importance of the survival instinct. theres plenty of other informal heuristics that are gold as well.
Read with a friend for maximum enjoyment.
Taleb has gone through a considerable transformation during these four books - becoming ever more outspoken against objects of deplorability, ever more outspoken of western political approaches, ever more outspoken of wahabism/salafism.
and i love him for it. He even takes the steps to push all the technical justification for his views on fat-tails into a big technical appendix - leaving more time for taleb to make his varied points.
He jokes, teases, and rewards the reader. Subtle nods to stories and aspects of previous works are enjoyed here. Its clear hes having a ton of fun with the writing.
However all of this makes this book not quite the standalone success the others are - it builds upon the other books in a way that cant be separated. Black swan, fooled, antifragile could all be read by someone in isolation. This book is too self referential for that. So for taleb-veterans only, and specifically you have to have read Antifragile.
Haters of taleb will still continue to hate. So-called experts of all fields, militarists, fools of the cult of scientism.
The biggest takeaways from this tome are the silver rule (do not do to others as you would not want them to do to you), and the importance of the survival instinct. theres plenty of other informal heuristics that are gold as well.
Read with a friend for maximum enjoyment.
This is the first Taleb book I read and it didn't make a very good impression. Not only it is disorganized and somewhat self-defeating, I don't think I've ever read a more egocentric book. It is difficult to get past the bitter and abusive attacks that make no sense unless you happen to have been following Taleb's many Twitter fights circa 2016-2018: out-of-nowhere digressions about Michiko Kakutani ("either fabricating or drunk") is just one example among many. (Taleb, of course, assumes he is the center of your universe and so you've followed his various run-ins.)
Taleb is never content to simply lay out an argument. Anyone who disagrees with him has "mental handicaps" or is a member of "self-serving institutions". Taleb always has time to tell us how he learned Akkadian in order to recite the Code of Hamurabi in the original. How he lifts weights "with my blue-collar friends". And how hedge fund managers are just the best (since they have skin in the game).
One might almost be tempted to let all this slide if Taleb's arguments brilliant. But much of the book is incoherent rambling where it is hard to follow what particular point he is trying to make. This is worst in the "Introduction" (which takes up 1/5th of the entire book) but persists throughout. It is a shame because Taleb does have occasional insights but it is hard not to feel that Taleb "every elite is an idiot and the common person is 10x smarter than any elite" shtick accounts for a lot of his popularity.
I think the fatal weakness of the book, though, is that Taleb's advice is self-defeating. He flat out tells us:
But what is the penalty to Taleb if we follow his advice? All Taleb does in this book is give advice for a living. But he says we should ignore what he has to say. This isn't just an overly clever argument. Because Taleb clearly means there must be some armchair theorizers with no skin in the game that we should believe. But he's never interested in nuance. He's too busy airing grievances against Big Ag, Bob Rubin, "Hilary Monsanto-Malmaison, sometimes known as Hilary Clinton", Susan Sontag (she was rude to him once!), Sam Harris ("pseudo-rationalist"), The Guardian, and many more. (But Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are okay fellows since they have Skin In The Game.)
Taleb is never content to simply lay out an argument. Anyone who disagrees with him has "mental handicaps" or is a member of "self-serving institutions". Taleb always has time to tell us how he learned Akkadian in order to recite the Code of Hamurabi in the original. How he lifts weights "with my blue-collar friends". And how hedge fund managers are just the best (since they have skin in the game).
One might almost be tempted to let all this slide if Taleb's arguments brilliant. But much of the book is incoherent rambling where it is hard to follow what particular point he is trying to make. This is worst in the "Introduction" (which takes up 1/5th of the entire book) but persists throughout. It is a shame because Taleb does have occasional insights but it is hard not to feel that Taleb "every elite is an idiot and the common person is 10x smarter than any elite" shtick accounts for a lot of his popularity.
I think the fatal weakness of the book, though, is that Taleb's advice is self-defeating. He flat out tells us:
Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.
But what is the penalty to Taleb if we follow his advice? All Taleb does in this book is give advice for a living. But he says we should ignore what he has to say. This isn't just an overly clever argument. Because Taleb clearly means there must be some armchair theorizers with no skin in the game that we should believe. But he's never interested in nuance. He's too busy airing grievances against Big Ag, Bob Rubin, "Hilary Monsanto-Malmaison, sometimes known as Hilary Clinton", Susan Sontag (she was rude to him once!), Sam Harris ("pseudo-rationalist"), The Guardian, and many more. (But Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are okay fellows since they have Skin In The Game.)
Taleb, whose politics I did not pay attention to in Black Swan (and I skipped reading Antifragile), come off as a mix of right-neolib, classic liberal and Hayekian libertarian. It’s certainly possible, in addition, that he’s a Trump Train fellow traveler, though not riding the main line himself.
He’s anti-regulatory as part of libertarian part of him. Yes, agencies can suffer regulatory capture, but the libertarian idea espoused by him of regulation through private lawsuit doesn’t work. Most people don’t have the money for lawyers, not even to sue over being forced into arbitration, and contra his classical pseudo-erudition, we’re not classical Athens where one has to defend their own case without lawyers.
Second, he hates academics, and this book was presumably being written before Mary Beard punked him over people of color in Roman Britain. Given all the other things he says that relate to academia and are clearly wrong, such as claiming that the Essenes merged with Christianity, I’d hate academics and academia were I him too, because they clearly point out how fricking wrong he is.
He has privilege of dual Lebanese-French citizenship at birth and picked up BA and grad degree in Paris.
Hypocrite — says he’s no longer an active trader, thus HAS NO SKIN IN GAME, directly undercutting the main premise of this book.
Hypocrite 2 — says a lot of things don’t scale up or down well, yet seems to wish for the whole world, all nations, to be organized like Swiss cantons
His “good fences good neighbors make” for countries inside the Middle East comes an unspoken awfully close to justifying apartheid. He only mentions Arab states, but Israel-Palestine is surely in the back of his Lebanese Christian mind.
Related to that, his calling all Sunni Muslims barbarians is ridiculous. It might, or might not, be a stretch to make that claim for all Salafists within Sunni, but all Sunnis? And, when he attacks Sunnis, praising Shi’ites while ignoring Iran?
BSes himself about hedge funds having skin in the game. They have some, but not as much as other investors, and the fund manager usually draws a salary plus a percentage.
Seems to be strongly anti-GMO, and claims that Seralini was persecuted by Monsanto. Wrong. He had crappy research. His set of anti-GMO rants throughout this book are not just incredibly wrong, above all about risk factors and testing, but they border on the paranoiac. https://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/ And he believes in homeopathy.
He’s even more laughable when he claims the US was a low-rentier society until Obama. Dude ….. or duuuuuddeeee, the CDO slice-and-dice world, the housing bubble, and the bursting of the housing bubble all began under Shrub Bush.
Worse yet, Taleb seems to be some degree of fanboy of Trump on economic grounds. You mean, the four-times bankrupt Trump who gamed the American bankruptcy system to keep his skin out of the game? At this point, Taleb is basically becoming a parody of himself.
Also, a kind of one-trick pony, like Robert Wright with non-zero stuff.
Cognitive dissonance is not at all about sour grapes. Possibly the stupidest explanation of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever read.
The intuitional insight of a grandmother is not right 90 percent of the time. I note from my life that wearing hats does NOT make you go bald. And “masturbation makes you go blind” is of course a moral injunction disguised as insight.
Taleb is also wrong about relative economic mobility in the US vs. Old Europe. (Shock me.)
To the degree he has anything good to say, I steal from another reviewer: “His ideas are easy to summarize, because they are simplistic: People who commit risk are more interested in outcomes; systems that last longer have undergone more stress tests; and random events affect all plans.”
And, you could find that from somebody else.
He’s anti-regulatory as part of libertarian part of him. Yes, agencies can suffer regulatory capture, but the libertarian idea espoused by him of regulation through private lawsuit doesn’t work. Most people don’t have the money for lawyers, not even to sue over being forced into arbitration, and contra his classical pseudo-erudition, we’re not classical Athens where one has to defend their own case without lawyers.
Second, he hates academics, and this book was presumably being written before Mary Beard punked him over people of color in Roman Britain. Given all the other things he says that relate to academia and are clearly wrong, such as claiming that the Essenes merged with Christianity, I’d hate academics and academia were I him too, because they clearly point out how fricking wrong he is.
He has privilege of dual Lebanese-French citizenship at birth and picked up BA and grad degree in Paris.
Hypocrite — says he’s no longer an active trader, thus HAS NO SKIN IN GAME, directly undercutting the main premise of this book.
Hypocrite 2 — says a lot of things don’t scale up or down well, yet seems to wish for the whole world, all nations, to be organized like Swiss cantons
His “good fences good neighbors make” for countries inside the Middle East comes an unspoken awfully close to justifying apartheid. He only mentions Arab states, but Israel-Palestine is surely in the back of his Lebanese Christian mind.
Related to that, his calling all Sunni Muslims barbarians is ridiculous. It might, or might not, be a stretch to make that claim for all Salafists within Sunni, but all Sunnis? And, when he attacks Sunnis, praising Shi’ites while ignoring Iran?
BSes himself about hedge funds having skin in the game. They have some, but not as much as other investors, and the fund manager usually draws a salary plus a percentage.
Seems to be strongly anti-GMO, and claims that Seralini was persecuted by Monsanto. Wrong. He had crappy research. His set of anti-GMO rants throughout this book are not just incredibly wrong, above all about risk factors and testing, but they border on the paranoiac. https://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/ And he believes in homeopathy.
He’s even more laughable when he claims the US was a low-rentier society until Obama. Dude ….. or duuuuuddeeee, the CDO slice-and-dice world, the housing bubble, and the bursting of the housing bubble all began under Shrub Bush.
Worse yet, Taleb seems to be some degree of fanboy of Trump on economic grounds. You mean, the four-times bankrupt Trump who gamed the American bankruptcy system to keep his skin out of the game? At this point, Taleb is basically becoming a parody of himself.
Also, a kind of one-trick pony, like Robert Wright with non-zero stuff.
Cognitive dissonance is not at all about sour grapes. Possibly the stupidest explanation of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever read.
The intuitional insight of a grandmother is not right 90 percent of the time. I note from my life that wearing hats does NOT make you go bald. And “masturbation makes you go blind” is of course a moral injunction disguised as insight.
Taleb is also wrong about relative economic mobility in the US vs. Old Europe. (Shock me.)
To the degree he has anything good to say, I steal from another reviewer: “His ideas are easy to summarize, because they are simplistic: People who commit risk are more interested in outcomes; systems that last longer have undergone more stress tests; and random events affect all plans.”
And, you could find that from somebody else.
There were some interesting ideas that were new to me or at least presented in a new light. But there were also many ad hominem attacks and too much hypocrisy for me to enjoy the book.