greater philosophical rambling and deterioration of content
What sort of arguments are in this creationist book?
Unfortunately since his first book Nassim Taleb has become more and more unbearable from my perspective.  The original insights given in Fooled by Randomness were valuable as people often mistake noise for signals (the Signal and Noise is an excellent book on this which was published before anti-fragile).  But with each subsequent book the content goes into greater philosophical rambling and deterioration of content.  The author goes to great lengths to insult academics and those in the business community and to elevate himself in a one sided dialogue with the reader.  Its baffling and childish.  Antifragile is about things which gain in strength from volatility (or more broadly do well from uncertainty).  The author argues that people generally misevaluate the distribution of outcomes and as a result unerappreciate the uncertainty we face and put themselves in positions that are brittle to change.  That in itself is a relatively useful insight, though it is not original despite the author constantly trying to convince everyone he is the only person who understands this idea.The author seems to spend 95% of his time reading classics rather than what people in the modern world write and research and seems to have had some horrible interpersonal relationships with his former colleagues in the bank and in academics (probably because he can't articulate his points properly and doesnt have a logical process when making arguments).  The result is that he spends a lot of time insulting people on his perception of their beliefs when in fact most people appreciate all of his points and have made the same arguments a long time ago.  The author is not mathematical but tries to make out that he is and talks about the non-linearities of phenomenon which any literate person knows is not linear and claims these are very insightful ideas.  For example much time is spent about dropping objects from small heights multiple times vs dropping the same object from a great height and the fragility of the object is non-linear.  Ideas like this are trivial and a function of kinetic energy, among other things, which, yes, is non linear with respect to velocity.  To lecture and insult technical people about a high school physics idea and claim no one gets it is beyond unimpressive.  The author constantly tells the reader his professors were all fools who didnt understand what they were teaching because they only think in the context of their fields.  He talks about how he fooled his business school professors by using language they didnt understand.  He talks about how he knew the same things as Mandelbrot despite never reading it (which reinforces the fact that perhaps the author is less informed than he realizes).  He talks about how no one gets it (when they do because the points are simple).  I try to be an avid reader and even works where the authors tone was condescending I try to look through it to measure the content.  This is the first time I found it almost unbearable to finish.  If you want the best overview of what this book is about read the few page article by Taleb in This Explains Everything.  There are some important ideas in this book, relying on models creates risk biases which create fragility.  Distributions of outcomes for social sciences are poorly understood, hence trying to be formulaic can be naive.  But overall these ideas have other more articulate authors (Knight, Minsky, Hayek, Keynes, Mandelbrot, Shiller to name a few) who have less anger towards everyone.  Something has happened to the author in the last few years and it is very unhealthy... 