Iconoclasm Sells Books: The Writings of N. N. Taleb

The story goes that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, because only he admitted he knew nothing. Taleb is the Socratic inverse, because he believes that only he knows everything.

I have a lot of feelings about Nassim Taleb, most of them not charitable. He’s got me blocked on social media for reasons unknown to me. He brags about liking to win, but that’s not a win.

I actually dislike him so much that whatever value his ideas have are lost in the presentation. I dislike him so much when people I respect show their respect for Taleb, it doesn’t make me reassess Taleb, it makes me question those people. I have to ask, what is wrong with Branko Milanović, what is wrong with Miles Kimball. I dislike Taleb so much that I made a point of checking this book out of the library instead of spending my money and having some of that pass through to him.

And it’s a shame. I really liked the Black Swan. It was smart and well-written and fun to read and taught me things I hadn’t thought about. The problem was that it was successful. So that gave Taleb the freedom to say no to his editors and just write and be arrogant. Antifragile was overwritten and under edited – oddly in that he decries people loading up books with more and more argument in this book (specifically here to attack Piketty).  

So instead of looking at each book as a distinct whole, at some point he decided that they were linked and gave them a name. This isn’t “In search of lost time,” Naseem. But I suppose you want it to be, flashing your erudition out there for your readers, posting polyglot sentences and footnoting them, bringing in obscure references and belittling those who would need to google what the heck he’s talking about.

Because there’s the elephant in the room you have to talk about when you talk about Naseem Taleb. He has that sort of self-confidence that makes him think he’s above the social norms, like a Donald Trump or a school shooter. You can call him a bully or arrogant, but he likes that because he likes being confrontational. He is certain his worldview is correct, no matter how much it feels like some back-formed justification of who he already is.

But he’s smart enough to know that foundation of rhetoric: audience matters. You write [infinitive] [noun]. Here I’m writing to persuade readers. I’m not sure who the audience for these books are. This one, to get to the point, is also overwritten – rambling and unfocused though it is only 250 pages. The weird thing is there is a 15-page technical appendix at the end that is written clearly and readably and void of the personal attacks that fill the rest of the book. Because he does hold grudges – against Stephen Pinker and Sam Harris and the Saudis – he rides these like horses that as a reader get tired. And then there’s the weird thing that he really wants to identify with the cultures to the west of his homeland. Though Lebanese Christian, Turkey is about as Asian as his referents are; Africa ends on the banks of the Nile.

The shame is that there’s the seeds of an interesting book here. It just fails to grow.