It’s Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) and Nassim #Taleb and Rolf #Dobelli are throwing shit at each other. I reviewed Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile’ some months ago for DAS MAGAZIN (as I also did with Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, where, I guess, Dobelli has found even more inspiration for his projects than in Taleb’s books). Funnily (and now in a way sadly enough), Taleb considers Switzerland ‘the most antifragile place on the planet’, because ‘it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world.’ And then, one sentence later, comes the friend, which I assume was Dobelli. This friend told him that Lenin was playing chess with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in the Café they were sitting in Zurich (Café Odeon). It seems as if this friend also told him that Switzerland was a country with no visions, no lobbyists, no government. Which made it in Taleb’s view less-prone for shocks, less fragile, antifragile. In one of the first drafts of my review I wrote that Switzerland owes quite something to Dobelli to be considered as the ideal country by Taleb. I later deleted the sentence. Because it made, well, not much sense (a country owing something to somebody, very fragile, I suppose).
I haven’t really read Dobelli’s books (I browsed quickly through them) but It seems okay to me to condense heavier stuff like Kahneman’s (or Taleb’s) into lighter one, as long as you give them credit. What I know from ‘Antifragile’, you don’t want to be the one which gets the shit thrown on by Taleb. Taleb plays the Über-Fragilist when it comes to people he does not like (anymore).