IGX

I'm about a third of the way in, it's occasionally interesting but getting quite repetitive.
Taleb seems remarkably impressed with himself, seeing things Aristotle (and 2600 years of study on Aristotle) did not, though I find some of his assertions questionable and quite often he shapes theoretical events to his needs.
His early premise comparing the antifragility of a taxi-driver and the fragility of office work rests on the (specious, IMO) assumption that both pay roughly the same over time. If you're a low-level clerk, I suppose this is true but as a rule office work is chosen because it offers visibly superior benefits/pay to taxi-driving. Not to mention that an oil crisis makes the driver's bottom line weak.
Another, off the top of my head, is that Europe enjoyed "a century of relative peace" prior to WW I, which stoked the boiler that led to the Great War. That century included the tail of Napoleon, the Crimean War, German and Italian unification, the Franco-Prussian War and only a few years prior the Sino-Russian war - by his argument, these small wars should have been the variability that forestalled the massive war.

Early on he talks about how deadlifting 315 once a week as a 1RM allows him to maintain the physique of a bodyguard.

I've been reading it, but set it aside for other stuff more pressing. I got the gist of it, though. I've bought into a lot of it too.

For example, in my day job, we're using Monte Carlo simulations to estimate risk, where the uncertainty is small in all of the pieces and they sort of sum together. I can't help but look at it now and think, that shit doesn't matter. What matters is when the one guy writing the critical piece of code gets a deadly STD or gets run over in the crosswalk and dies. Low probability but it destroys the whole program.

Also looking at engineering changes, and how a small change can propagate due to not-understood couplings into a change avalanche that kills the program.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 83448.html
Read the article above a while ago, and enjoyed it. Haven't read Antifragile yet, but this seems like a pretty good summary of the premise. One of the things I liked about Black Swan is that he was both specific and general-- as Nafod suggests, things that make sense vary by business and industry.

I think his basic idea is fundamentally sound, but his explication is long and short on specifics - or, more accurately, long on anecdotes and short on specifics.
I'm sticking it out to see where he goes in the later chapters that (apparently) deal with a number of divergent topics).

Only marginally relevant, but I enjoyed watching Taleb behave like a twat the other week.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-t ... 013-4?op=1