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NN Taleb’s books. He has said that books should surprise the reader every single page or else it’s not real writing.
by Tycho 8y ago
NN Taleb’s books. He has said that books should surprise the reader every single page or else it’s not real writing.
- telltale123 8y agoI read parts of a couple of Taleb’s books, Black Swan and Antifragile. There are a few original ideas in each and then they are reapplied again and again in different domains. I often get how the applications go after reading the section titles, thus I think it can still be more concise. That said, the two books have much better signal-to-noise ratio than some high-brow journalistic pieces.
- DenisM 8y agoI found the black swan to be 80% fluff. Still a worthwhile reading, though.
- jl2718 8y agoCould not tolerate. I read hundreds of nonfiction books, and this is one of the few I could not get through.
- DenisM 8y agoI found it worth the struggle in the end. One of the most influential books in my life, I’d probably put it as #3.
- nottorp 8y agoBlack Swan could have been a pretty good book at 15% of it's current size. I got tired of being told the same thing in at least 5-6 different ways every time and never finished it.
- canhascodez 8y agoTaleb has often been accused of lacking rigor in his arguments. He does write well, though.
- 77pt77 8y ago> NN Taleb’s books Quite the opposite. He expands one single argument ad nauseum into each of his books. It's exasperating.
- Tycho 8y agowhich single argument?
- 77pt77 8y agoEach book has a different one.
- giardini 8y agoAnd they are?
- pas 8y ago> Black Swan Fat tailed probability distributions are fat tailed...! Assuming normal distribution underestimates risky events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution > and Antifragile Simple complex systems are too complex to be simple enough ...! Okay, so this is a bit more technical, but the important thing is that unintelligent systems (= they are simple) that are complex (= have complex dynamics) are bad at adapting to different circumstances. Also, these systems are products of design trade offs. (We want things to be cheap and get done fast, and also politically okay, and so on.) And thus they are not robust enough, nor resilient enough. They are fragile. (Taleb laments a lot about how antifragiltiy is different from robustness and resilience. And sure, they are because he uses a model in which they are.) And the book talks about what is needed for anti-fragility, and it turns out that some kind of feedback loop that optimizes for certain problems. Or of course intelligence.
- 77pt77 8y agoThank you. I couldn't have explained it better. > Fooled by randomness. Selection / survivorship bias