Taleb likes to keep fit, and once built a muscle. In Anti-Fragility, he said wryly, "At some readers' meetings, some readers really find it hard to accept an intellectual who looks like a bodyguard-intellectuals are either skinny or obese (especially when wearing tweed coats), but they really shouldn't look like butchers. "
Taleb's fitness reason is that when his views on the financial crisis became more and more known, he received many threats, so someone suggested that he hire some bodyguards. And we, an empirical scholar, like to exercise by ourselves, so we turned ourselves into intellectuals like bodyguards.
Taleb is a legend, not because he predicted the economic crisis in 2008 and was misunderstood by many people, nor because he just read the comments of the publishing house after the launch of Black Swan. Taleb never thought that the "black swan" was predictable, and he never admitted that he had predicted any economic crisis and "9 1 1 event". On the contrary, he used his philosophy to realize that fragile things, such as Greenspan's economy, would collapse, but unfortunately, he was right.
In addition to the most famous Black Swan, Taleb has three other books, one of which is called the Uncertainty Tetralogy. The tetralogy is named after Italian Inseto, which is closely related to the themes of Taleb's four books.
The following are introduced respectively according to the publishing order of the author's original works. Here, I just mentioned what I got from reading these books. It is impossible to summarize the author's thoughts into a few sentences, otherwise the author would not write a book to introduce them.
Therefore, as long as you throw a brick to attract jade, you can arouse your interest in reading the author's works and achieve your goal.
This is the first book of Taleb's four-part. Maybe it is unknown. In this book, the editor or author intentionally omitted Taleb's banter and cursing style in his later works.
In this book, there are many shadows that benefit from evolutionary biology, especially Dawkins' random exposition of Darwin's theory of evolution in selfish genes.
However, this book is still praised as one of the 75 "smartest books ever" by Fortune magazine. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and published with a cumulative sales volume of 550,000 copies.
Taleb put forward some basic concepts such as randomness, uncertainty and asymmetry in this book, which are also the basic concepts he elaborated in other works later.
The writing principle of this book, the author has explained in the preface, "avoid discussing things that I have not experienced personally, or things that I have not developed alone;" And I haven't fully absorbed what I have digested, and I can't write it without effort. "
This book can still reflect the author's consistent persistence. Taleb invented a female writer who likes to marry a philosopher in Black Swan, and declared in Anti-Fragility that his book "mixed autobiographical reflection, metaphor and more philosophical and scientific investigations."
This style is very much to my taste, at least let me know how people in the Levant view themselves and their history after Constantinople was occupied and Byzantine adherents were there.
The book "Black Swan" published before the financial crisis in 2007 made it famous. This is also Taleb's first book translated into simplified Chinese.
After reading this book, I was deeply shocked. That I can't be calm for a long time, and I don't know how to evaluate it. This is my reaction after I met a good book, a simple book, easy to understand and easy to read. You can scribble a book review.
Reading a book with great connotation often makes people think for a long time and takes time to ponder and think. It can often bring you rich output. At least influenced by the book Black Swan, I published no less than five articles in the newspaper to think deeply.
The main point of this book, in my opinion, is unpredictability, that is, we often have insufficient understanding of sudden crises and are completely unprepared.
Going deep into the study of history, I saw Popper's Poverty of Historicism, read Hume, and saw that Taleb was in the same strain as these skeptical scholars in history.
Studying history is not to find out the laws of history, but to see the unpredictability of history. This made me regard Game of Thrones as a fable of the "Black Swan" incident, and it was also applied to the writing of my own novel Charles V.
There are two versions of this book translated into Chinese, the one published on 20 12 is called the wisdom of random survival, and the one published on 20 16 is called wisdom and curse. In fact, they are both publishers and translators. Once again, it shows the liar behavior of the publishing house. Fortunately, A Fool's Walk has not been translated into Black Swan 2, and Anti-Fragility has not been translated into Black Swan 3.
Because it is this publishing house that has always been shameless. It translated dan ariely's first book Predictable Irrationality into Weird Behavior, and then translated the author's second book, Positive Forces of Irrationality into Weird Behavior 2, and then tasted the sweetness of changing the title and published Weird Behavior 3 Out of Control. So that the author's new book "The Honest Truth" was translated into "Weird Behavior 4" ... Although all of them have subtitles, they can't hide the speculative mentality.
This book can be said to be a collection of Taleb's proverbs, a bit like Franklin's Poor Richard's Yearbook. You don't need to read it all at once. You can flip it and chew it back and forth when you have time. Every sentence reveals a lot of experience and philosophy.
The book Anti-Fragility is an extension of Black Swan. Since the "black swan" is unpredictable, how to avoid risks and survive? This book is the answer given by Taleb:
A reporter, probably after watching Black Swan, took advantage of the bestseller and wrote a book called Grey Rhino. This book is full of cases, but it doesn't really help. So, let's look at Taleb's own answer.
The author puts forward three concepts: fragility, tenacity and anti-fragility.
Fragility and anti-fragility are opposite concepts, good and bad, black and white, while tenacity is in the middle and gray. Many things we encounter are in one of these ternary structures. Everything planned and built from top to bottom belongs to the fragile category, which is hard to bear the blow of the "Black Swan" incident, while from bottom to top, it has anti-fragility.
A good book needs to be read repeatedly, and every time you read it, you will get another harvest. Taleb's book needs a lot of mathematical thinking and statistical knowledge, but don't be hindered by such things. If you master these terms a little, you can further understand these works.
After all, Taleb prefers to call himself a philosopher.