I read parts of a couple of Taleb’s books, Black Swan and Antifragile. There are a few original ideas in each and then they are reapplied again and again in different domains.
I often get how the applications go after reading the section titles, thus I think it can still be more concise. That said, the two books have much better signal-to-noise ratio than some high-brow journalistic pieces.
Black Swan could have been a pretty good book at 15% of it's current size. I got tired of being told the same thing in at least 5-6 different ways every time and never finished it.
Simple complex systems are too complex to be simple enough ...!
Okay, so this is a bit more technical, but the important thing is that unintelligent systems (= they are simple) that are complex (= have complex dynamics) are bad at adapting to different circumstances.
Also, these systems are products of design trade offs. (We want things to be cheap and get done fast, and also politically okay, and so on.) And thus they are not robust enough, nor resilient enough. They are fragile. (Taleb laments a lot about how antifragiltiy is different from robustness and resilience. And sure, they are because he uses a model in which they are.)
And the book talks about what is needed for anti-fragility, and it turns out that some kind of feedback loop that optimizes for certain problems. Or of course intelligence.
The core point you missed in antifragile is inference in the presence of uncertainty - a conservative barbell like strategy (80-20 rule or 90-10 rule). This is very easy to overlook but this to me was the key takeaway - in structuring a portfolio, picking art projects etc.
I often get how the applications go after reading the section titles, thus I think it can still be more concise. That said, the two books have much better signal-to-noise ratio than some high-brow journalistic pieces.