Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese American philosopher, essayist, scholar, statistician and former derivatives trader, whose work mainly concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. He defines himself as a “skeptical empiricist”
Book: This book is a collection of aphorisms on topics like narratives, randomness, aesthetics ethics, stoicism, etc. The idea of the book could be summarized in contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance and erudition against modern philistinism and phoniness.
Opinion: This is the last book I read from Nassim Taleb, and it was quite fun. It is a collection of aphorisms, so the style is like many of his tweets – 3/4 lines explaining (mostly) contrarian ideas ranging from daily life to investing or philosophy. Even if I think that some of his affirmations are exaggerations of reality and context-dependent, if one spends some time reflecting on them, they can be quite insightful and fun to read. It is important to acknowledge that many of his ideas are robust simplifications of reality, so they will not work every single time. However, you should know when n=1 adds information or not. Final warning: 99% of the population can be offended when reading Taleb’s books/papers/tweets, so do not take things personally, use his ideas as food for thought, and not as universal truths. Find attached some random pages of the book (not necessarily the best)
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