Comments on: Review of “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb (a.k.a. Doc Savage)

By: haig

haig — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:53:22 +0000

Actually yes, it does mean it is an adaptive system. Changing and learning from experience == improvement with errors, at least if you do not limit the set of experiences to just positive outcomes.

By: haig

haig — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:48:46 +0000

Nice comment, but I think you have overstated the case that antifragility does not optimize for stability, or that it absolutely requires fragility to propagate down into its component parts. Taleb’s antifragility actually is optimizing for stability, as much as such optimization is tractable in the real world. Creating antifragile systems is a ratcheting up of convexity, at each point the component systems are allowed to fail, but the negative results of failure are minimized while the positive benefits from success are left open ended. This removes the possibility of large systemic failures, it avoids building a house of cards.

By: Nassim Taleb, Antifragile (Review Round-up) | Mitchell Powell's Blog

Nassim Taleb, Antifragile (Review Round-up) | Mitchell Powell's Blog — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:06:47 +0000

[...] And somewhere out on the internets a fellow on the internet named “Doc Savage” writes, in what is a partial review of the book devoted to Taleb’s sometimes grating tone, “We find out that Taleb hates TV, air-conditioning, sissies, and most economists. He has taken up weightlifting and, using a training technique he learned from “Lenny Cake” he can deadlift 350 pounds. He is now so strong that people mistake him for a bodyguard. You can’t make this stuff up.” (Here.) [...]

By: miketornado

miketornado — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 02:42:42 +0000

Do not attempt to please 99% of the people with safe, middle of the road thoughts or comments. Make bold statements and you will have a following. Better a passionate, cult-like % than a majority that is not moved and so will probably never (in his case) even read or hear the message. Wasn’t that, or something like that, in the book? Seems to be true.

By: Austin Yun

Austin Yun — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:12:37 +0000

As a fellow combination weightlifting and statistics aficionado, a 350 lb deadlift isn’t that much ¯\(°_o)/¯

By: lylenexgen

lylenexgen — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:30:54 +0000

Consider what you have “gotten… so far” in the light of “too big to fail”; there are inherent advantages to keeping systems to the smallest scale at which they can be effective. Avoidance of monopoly is usually advanced as a reason for keeping competition alive between small systems that aggregately produce as much as a larger system; but there is other reasons; the failure of a single small system is less costly, and the fitness of a small system is more likely to improve than that of a larger system.

By: Comunidades tribais são mais violentas? O quão próxima é a distribuição normal? O papel do BNDES. | Análise Real

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 01:14:37 +0000

[...] – Review do livro de Nassim Taleb, Antifragile; [...]

By: normaldeviate

normaldeviate — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 13:40:26 +0000

I would love to answer in detail but I don’t want to discuss
politics and economics on my blog.

Ask me in person.

By: Min Xu

Min Xu — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 06:44:43 +0000

Hi Larry. Interesting post as always; learned about Doc Savage for the first time. I’m curious about the reasons for which you support decentralized authority, especially in the domain of economics. I have never studied economics seriously and have never looked at any economic data beyond the pretty graphs occasionally published by NYTimes, so I ask out of genuine curiosity and not to argue.

Do you think the historical economic data very firmly justify the merits of decentralized authority or are your views partly supported by a natural intuition? What do you think about the opinion that strong government command and interference is necessary in event of crisis–economic, natural, social, or military?

By: normaldeviate

normaldeviate — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:52:11 +0000

To be fair to Taleb, keep in mind that that was a 2 sentence summary of his whole book.
I was oversimplifying the message.