[dantheman0207]

N. N. Taleb always says you shouldn’t read any books that are less than 200 years old. If a book survives for 200 years it must have something genuinely valuable to say.

I think this is good advice. I try to follow it for the most part, but obviously I don’t apply that to technical material. Still, I bet if you read Euclid instead of O’Reilly you’d end up a pretty good programmer.

[gassiss]

I've read some of Taleb's books and while I find him very smart and with very valuable insights, I'd rather take some of these extreme things he says (like what you pointed) with a grain of salt.

[logfromblammo]

And how old are his books?

Paradoxes are fun, but dangerous to organize your life around.