This short review was originally written in April of 2021.

Overall,  Antifragile is a disappointment.  This is not to say it offers no interesting and useful ideas. It does.  What strikes me the most are the oversized impact of tail events (black swans) and their utter unpredictability, our ruinous obsession with optimization and intervention, and the agent problem ubiquitous in modern societies.  However, Taleb could have explained these ideas in 40 pages. Instead, he wrote 400, filling many of them with impulsive bragging, as well as his signature rant against the entire intellectual establishment.  In the end, I felt these self-inflicted distractions severely undermine the narrative and the logic flow.    I was looking forward to reading Black Swan, but after this experience, I wonder whether it would be worth my time.

A special note for my fellow academics who might be interested in Taleb’s work: he absolutely hates professors and minces no words berating them, so if you take the challenge, buckle up for a bumpy ride.