I'll get to Taleb, really. I can't say that any book changed my life. The Christian Bible shaped it, as I was forced live with it as a child and young adult (al

I'll get to Taleb, really. I can't say that any book changed my life. The Christian Bible shaped it, as I was forced live with it as a child and young adult (although the thought that I was "forced" did not occur to me til much later in life). I'm no longer religious, but neither do I share the sciento-athiest's belief in something from nothing, or accidental "is". To me they (sciento-athiests and religious teachers) are just warring priesthoods, the ancient and the modern, both pretending to knowledge they do not possess and can never rationally hope to possess. Please do not conflate my coinage of sciento-athiest with scientist -- overlap is possible, but that's not the fault of the honest scientist. But Taleb, despite what at times seems to me nearly unbearable self-serving pomposity, gets at some real truths in both of the books mentioned. Oddly they are the only two Taleb books I've read. Of the two, I found Antifragile the better. I read it fairly carefully despite my inclination to skim at times. I'm glad I did. A careful reading makes it clear that he carefully qualifies the limits of antifragile strategies. And it took some repeated explication from Taleb to see that the idea he was poking at was subtle, important, and nowhere near as obvious as my initial reaction would have indicated.