Skip to main content

Nassim Nicholas Taleb




Below I'll provide a link to a well-written blast at the expense of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book, Anti-Fragile.

The thesis of the book is that there are three different states-of-being for institutions, individuals, even academic theories: fragility, robustness, and anti-fragility. These are also, in order: really bad, not so bad, good. [I've written about one aspect of this book in this blog quite recently -- Taleb figures in my series of posts about  Krugman and Gould. ]

A brief illustration of the thesis might run this way: a nation that has built its whole economy around the production and sale of wine would be fragile. It would depend for its livelihood on the international market for wine, and, (even if demand for wine holds up forever) it could be devastated by climate changes that make its own terrain less hospitable to grapes.

A nation that was less dependent on any single market or product would be robust.

But better than robustness is anti-fragility. This is the quality of a system that is actually improved by difficulties, push-backs, etc. [I won't try to apply this to wine or climate change.]

David Runciman, reviewing the book for The Guardian, (there's the promised link) focuses pungently on what he sees as the child rearing implications of Taleb's thesis:

Being a parent is an inherently fragile business, given the permanent possibility of something going disastrously wrong. Of course, one way to avoid that would be to live in a world where people are accustomed to their children dying young. Taleb is deeply and depressingly nostalgic for the virtues of the ancients, with their stoicism and tolerance for suffering. To want to return to the miseries of a world that requires such virtues strikes me as ridiculous.

The point, more broadly, is that though anti-fragility is in some contexts an appealing insight (that's why so many people like to boast "whatever doesn't kill me, makes me stronger," after all!), trying to build a worldview around it leaves you with a good deal of unhelpful baggage, if not necessarily .... fragility.

Runciman's final shot? "I am pretty sure people will still be reading Taleb's two previous books in 10 years' time. But I'd be surprised if they are still reading this one."





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more