I think Antifragile is quite useful and a good concept to keep in mind for many things. In fact, it is perhaps more broadly applicable than the Black Swan.

I think Taleb is from Hammurabi's general neighborhood, by birth. I wonder if he already knew some dialect of Assyrian/Babylonian/Aramaic already. They're still used, mostly liturgically.

I think he has a strong Lebanese background.

I enjoyed Black Swan: "Everyone is doing statistics wrong, except me" and was about to read Anti-fragile... Maybe I will quit while he is ahead.

I enjoyed Fooled by Randomness, and, to a lesser degree, Black Swan. But recently Taleb has just taken a dive off the deep end.

While I did enjoy Fooled by Randomness, it was a needlessly hard to read

The reviews Antifragile and Balck Swan makes me think, they will hard the same problem

While Nassim Taleb is definitely smart and brings up nice idea, those ideas are better presented in shorter articles

What, in particular, about his recent work makes you think he's taken a dive off the deep end?

Mostly his blanket dismissal that anyone who is not from his particular background could have anything meaningful to say about risk/statistics/trading. All academics are ivory tower intellectuals, all politicians are corrupt flunkies, everyone else not ruthlessly optimizing for optionality and/or skin in the game is stupid or incompetent or both.

What really ruined Antifragility for me was his apparent inability to make his point without insulting the intelligence of some central banker and/or professor literally every other paragraph.

His arguments are sometimes very fragile and overly broad.

He has this fetishism about past times. For example, He claims things that stood the test of time have proved their worth. But he just ignores things that have stood the test of time but are loathsome, like sexism and racism. Not only have they stood the test of time but these ideas often co evolved over diverse populations.

Much of his examples are extremely cherry picked and I’m really not into his embrace of what basically amounts to grandma wisdom. It has a place but he isn’t nuanced about it and is incredibly arrogant. I do think he has some interesting ideas though but he strikes me as insufferable at times

<insert comment about the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq, or any other thing>

I laughed at the Pinker bit. Taleb does seem to have a bit of an obsession there.