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> Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall. Indeed, that is why I couldn't make it past the second chapter of Antifragile. His insistence on citation

> Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall. Indeed, that is why I couldn't make it past the second chapter of Antifragile. His insistence on citationless, just-so stories to explain everything (in his world everything has a snarky one-liner explanation) make his writing a huge turn-off to me. I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd since I would expect engineers to insist on statements being backed up by evidence. However, this article contains some good insights. Although it was permeated with matter-of-fact insults to practically every group of people, the insults were less vicious than those of many of his other works.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd Anti-(established)-expert bias and reducing complex problems and their solutions to clever (and often, though not always, snarky) one-liners are kind of bread-and-butter of the startup world.
zem 10y ago
i wouldn't even mind the just-so stories if they were presented in good faith as real anecdata, but having him use a fictional just-so story in "the black swan" was a step too far. it's sad, because the man is a good writer; "black swan" also contained the best write-up of hempel's raven paradox i've seen, including martin gardner's/
- linkregister 10y ago
  I haven't checked out Black Swan; is it worth a read?
  - zem 10y ago
    i went and dug up my review from when i read it (the blanked out name is a friend of mine whose review i was replying to, and who hated the book). amusingly, my feeling that he was a good writer seems to be me remembering his style as better than it actually was; i tend to remember the good bits of stuff longer than the bad: Reading part 1, I thought "Oh God, ____ is right, the man is an idiot." I realised, though, that he simply wasn't all that good a writer, which is not the same thing. I also got the impression that he was indulging in stylistic experiments, which detracted from the book. Anyway, one or two good ideas in there, and a nice discussion of Hempel's Raven Paradox (even better than Gardner's, so score one for him). But mostly part 1 was a matter of slogging through a lot of text for little reward. Part 2 got a bit more interesting, though here ____'s second claim of "the good parts aren't original and the original parts aren't good" was sadly borne out. Some decent material, but mostly stuff I'd read in lots of other places, pulled together into (to be fair) a pretty coherent narrative. Part 3, surprisingly enough, got a lot more interesting. I'm not sure what the difference was, but it did seem that he was genuinely offering insights of his own, rather than regurgitating other people's. He did also seem to have some genuinely valuable stuff to say. At any rate, I found myself reading the rest of the book with a lot more engagement and a lot less feeling of having to slog through it. On the whole, I think he does have a few genuine, and genuinely insightful points to make, shadowed by his rather clunky writing style and by the fact that he's rather full of himself. I think I will reread the book a chapter at a time, to make sure I get his point.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd Anti-(established)-expert bias and reducing complex problems and their solutions to clever (and often, though not always, snarky) one-liners are kind of bread-and-butter of the startup world.

zem 10y ago

i wouldn't even mind the just-so stories if they were presented in good faith as real anecdata, but having him use a fictional just-so story in "the black swan" was a step too far. it's sad, because the man is a good writer; "black swan" also contained the best write-up of hempel's raven paradox i've seen, including martin gardner's/

linkregister 10y ago
I haven't checked out Black Swan; is it worth a read?
- zem 10y ago
  i went and dug up my review from when i read it (the blanked out name is a friend of mine whose review i was replying to, and who hated the book). amusingly, my feeling that he was a good writer seems to be me remembering his style as better than it actually was; i tend to remember the good bits of stuff longer than the bad: Reading part 1, I thought "Oh God, ____ is right, the man is an idiot." I realised, though, that he simply wasn't all that good a writer, which is not the same thing. I also got the impression that he was indulging in stylistic experiments, which detracted from the book. Anyway, one or two good ideas in there, and a nice discussion of Hempel's Raven Paradox (even better than Gardner's, so score one for him). But mostly part 1 was a matter of slogging through a lot of text for little reward. Part 2 got a bit more interesting, though here ____'s second claim of "the good parts aren't original and the original parts aren't good" was sadly borne out. Some decent material, but mostly stuff I'd read in lots of other places, pulled together into (to be fair) a pretty coherent narrative. Part 3, surprisingly enough, got a lot more interesting. I'm not sure what the difference was, but it did seem that he was genuinely offering insights of his own, rather than regurgitating other people's. He did also seem to have some genuinely valuable stuff to say. At any rate, I found myself reading the rest of the book with a lot more engagement and a lot less feeling of having to slog through it. On the whole, I think he does have a few genuine, and genuinely insightful points to make, shadowed by his rather clunky writing style and by the fact that he's rather full of himself. I think I will reread the book a chapter at a time, to make sure I get his point.