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Comment by pchm | Hacker News Reader

Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game).

Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and things like stories of success/failure, biographies (or history in general) etc. will no longer make the same impression.

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Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books. I first read Black Swan a long while back, and two things popped out at me. 1) The author comes across quite snobby and high-handed in his writing (which has translated over time on his Twitter as well for those who follow him on there) and 2) The essence of the book was distillable into a much smaller novella.

Picked up Antifragile and Fooled By Randomness over time just to see if the hype is worth it, but none of the books honestly bowled me over or presented anything enlightening or explored ideas not explored in a better manner elsewhere. I feel like Taleb falls into the same fallacy he preaches about in his books to a large extent. But then again, given his popularity, maybe it's just my opinion.

> Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books.

I have the same feeling. Don't get me wrong, I really respect Taleb and his insights. But I skipped a large part of Black Swan because some parts are more literature than insights.

He got one thing right: the picked a great title for a book. "Black Swan". These 2 words together made him a multi-millionaire. The content of the book is quite lame, but darn, what a killer title.

Based on my non-fiction reading habits, I believe this is true for 90% of the non-fiction books I've read. In fact, most can be broke down into a series of highlighs / quotes.

That said, no pain, no gain. The higher bar creates a sense of dedication for the reader. A 5k and a marathon are both "just running", but it's the latter better sharpens the sword, so to speak.

"Thinking fast and slow" is like this, it's a bit dry and it makes for hard reading (I tried by the poolside) but it's sort of more rewarding to fight through it.

5 minute summaries are also forgotten in the same amount of time.

It might feel rewarding but most of the stuff past the system 1 and system 2 concept is a long list of studies that don't replicate presented as fact.

Not just you. I felt like Black Swan was utterly forgettable and could be summarized as "shit happens". The name dropping and snobbery put me off reading anything else by him.

This is true for many books. Publishers demand more pages though

It is true. But we also have to consider many people not only read books to learn and consume information as efficient as possible but also because they enjoy reading. It's like saying a 2 hr movie could have been reduced to a 10 min video that explains the story. You want to see development, different stories, jokes, etc. Even for non-fiction books (non-academic of course).

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