Taleb is a Soup Nazi. He (volubly) suffers for his soup. He treats customers with disdain. And yet people line up for the soup, because it's pretty good, actual

Taleb is a Soup Nazi. He (volubly) suffers for his soup. He treats customers with disdain. And yet people line up for the soup, because it's pretty good, actually. I find Taleb's opinionated eccentricity very useful, especially when it consists of a mixture of ideas, some of which you totally agree with and some which you totally disagree. Keeps you alert and thinking, instead of blindly swallowing or blindly rejecting everything depending on religious preferences (e.g. iOS vs Android) Antifragility is perhaps the most important perception-refactoring concept since the selfish gene, and the book deserves to be read purely for that reason. The book is pretty laudatory of engineers and the tinkering mentality, crediting them for most of the inventions of the past age, rather than top-down science. Erudition is great. But it is far easier for the engineer to become erudite than for a liberal arts major to become an engineer. Where Taleb is wrong is that (good) science fiction is not about predicting the future. It is really speculative economics fiction - how would a mix of this kind of intelligent agents and this kind of resource environment work out? The science, futurism and the aliens are merely literary tools to help you get out of a human/today-centric point of view. They are thought experiments which can be sold to the public (at least, the engineering public). And God, I hate longhand as the primary mode of input. Connecting the iPad to ancient tablets is the kind of wankery one gets from the erudite, I guess :) (I'm picking very small nits here; "Antifragile" is overall very thought provoking. Highly recommended.)