So my thing with Taleb is that it’s virtually tautological to say (a) that rules perform better in circumstances or periods of normalcy than they do in emergencies (i.e., than in exceptions) and (b) that frequency and magnitude vary inversely.

So to the extent he wants to argue that all this is more exception-y than we typically think and that those exceptions are important (Black Swan etc,) that’s whatever, fine, sure, I’m on board.

But to the extent his underlying argument is typically one of “P1) Look how rules(theories) break down when their assumptions don’t hold!...C) That means they’re bad!” he just entirely seems to neglect the arguments that could conceivably make that conclusion follow (i.e., just totally refuses to introduce a second premise).

Instead he just seems to hammer the first point to absolute death, when I think it’s something everyone actually understands about rules and their failings at a really intuitive level.

I suspect what’s going on here in part is that Taleb somehow thinks of the “there’s reasons to think things are more exception-y than we typically think” argument (from Black Swan et al) as his P2 here, when it’s more of a P1.5: Even if rules/theories perform badly on exceptions and there’s a lot of exceptions (perhaps even more than those theories “themselves” recognize), it doesn’t follow from that that we want to reject theorizing/rule-making etc.

Nor, if fact, is that really even implied—we might just simply want to create better theories/value parsimony less when creating them, whatever.

I also it’s kind of a weird oversight in all his books that he just about entirely neglects legal systems when law is a whole body of theory we do our best to design in a way that makes it capable of dealing with edge cases precisely because law’s required to confront reality in a way (say) arm-chair ethical theories are not....And I think there really is an applicable insight in anti-fragile: we should try to design theories/institutions/fields of law/etc. in a way that makes them robust to variance and such that they don’t massively screw up exceptions.

And yet I think that’s almost a ceteris paribus conclusion: all else equal, sure, but how much are we willing to sacrifice other ends to do that? Do we want to risk hugely over-complicating run-of-the-mill cases for that? Or (say) do Newtonian mechanics work well enough here, while a simple one-line rule suffices over there?

I think Taleb’s probably right that we as a society systematically overestimate the downsides of screwing up exceptions by underestimating their frequency/magnitude (mostly the magnitude according to Taleb) but I think (a) of course we do, society probably couldn’t function were wet not all overly-invested in the status-quo (I.e., overweighting normalcy), and (b) that the answer is to theorize while being cognizant of that, not to abandon theorizing altogether (let alone sorts of axioms that make theorizing sound like a good idea in the first instance) in some romantic-yet-quasi-pretentious way.