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."

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