What Nassim Taleb can teach us
I really appreciate his books, <i>The Black Swan</i> and <i>Antifragile</i> particularly, though it does seem to me he&#x27;s set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books. Then again, as long as he has extra stuff to add, and a readership willing to purchase them, I suppose this is utterly acceptable.<p>However, as a person, he seems to be an absolute rabid nutter. At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive. He rants and raves on Twitter[1]. Lately he&#x27;s been engaged in an utterly hysterical tirade against a historian about the ethnic diversity (or lack thereof) in Roman Britain... whichever side you take in this at an intellectual level (personally, I&#x27;m more on his side than not), the tone and mode of the conversation as conducted by him is absolutely rabid and unacceptable.<p>[1] Full disclosure: he banned me on Twitter years ago because I fucked up an integral he had posed as a question for followers. Make of this what you will.