Since I so thoroughly enjoyed The Black Swan, I shouldn’t have delayed until now reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2012 book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder.  But having finally gotten around to it, I recommend it highly for its withering critique of the naïve interventionism of today’s academic establishment figures – from finance to geopolitics to medicine – thanks to their utter inability to distinguish linear and non-linear systems, and to account for the risks of real world complex systems, relying instead on their woefully artificial and inadequate models.

Here’s a link to a recent piece by Taleb, On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects, that will give you a glimpse at some of what he says in Antifragile.   I’ve cherry-picked a couple of lines from it to share some of Taleb’s outrage that Yazidis, Christian minorities, Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans should pay the price for the Empire’s recent foreign interventions:

These interventionistas not only lack practical sense, and never learn from history, but they even make mistakes at the pure reasoning level, which they drown in some form of semi-abstract discourse.

Their three flaws: 1) They think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high dimensions, 3) they think in actions, never interactions.…

So we end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth.…

Interventionistas don’t learn because they are not the victims to their mistakes.

The Best of Charles Goyette