

The Black Swan author's latest book is full of important warnings and insights – and a whole lot of hubris
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'Overconfidence': Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Photograph: Murdo Macleod Murdo Macleod/Murdo Macleod

Bindweed is a thing of evil genius. Try to dig it up and it breaks into pieces, each of which will grow into a new plant. More than just robust or flexible, it actively thrives on disruption. Yet we lack a word for this property – which Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes as the exact opposite of fragility. So he has given it one: antifragility.

Taleb argues that antifragility is essential for dealing with the subject of the book that made his name: black swans. These are rare, unpredictable events for which we can never be fully prepared. What we can do, however, is locate the fragility in the system and reduce it. "Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable," he writes; "building something fragile to them is not."

Taleb is also right to point out that many things require some kind of stress or irregularity to function well, such as our bodies. If the environment is too disinfected, we lose the ability to resist infection. Vaccines introduce a little of what is harmful to build resistance to disease. True, but that does not make us the opposite of fragile. On the contrary, we are all-too fragile, vulnerable to being destroyed by one dose of the wrong poison or virus, one smash by the wrong vehicle at the wrong speed. What Taleb calls antifragile only loves volatility "up to a point": even bindweed dies if you stress it too much. But there is no "up to a point" about fragility's hatred of volatility: a vase will not refuse to shatter if you drop it from high enough.

Nothing is the exact opposite of fragile, and that is why "There is no word for 'antifragility' in the main known languages, ancient, colloquial or slang." Taleb should have heeded his own warning against the hubris of thinking we are wiser than thousands of years of human culture.

This is far from the only time when Taleb overstates his case, committing errors he attributes to others. His overconfidence, ironically, makes his arguments more fragile to refutation than they needed to be. This is a shame, because his book is full of important warnings and insights. For instance, greater efficiency is making us more fragile: ever-leaner supply chains and production methods mean no slack is built into the system. The self-employed are more, not less, financially secure than the employed, because they can constantly adjust their offering to respond to changing demand, whereas the employed lose everything if their jobs go. He also argues that the exact same theory, dismissed as trivial or common sense, will be lauded as brilliant if presented in the form of a complicated mathematical formula. And that the rule of unintended, unforeseen consequences means that you do not need positive evidence of harm to be wary of major health interventions. And that we tend to place too much weight on there being a good theory to explain why something works, rather than simply looking at whether it does so or not.

Despite its many virtues, Taleb's book is hard to like, since while its author endorses Nietzsche's maxim "What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent" he writes according to the opposite principle, dismissing with a sneer all with which he disagrees, such as those in the "phony professions" of journalism and academia. If my conclusion seems harsh, remember Taleb himself believes that what he would say about someone after a third bottle of wine, he is obliged to say in print. Believe me, I haven't even pulled the second cork.