I'm tiring of this book quickly. Simple ideas are expanded into entire sections that add no illumination that a simple paragraph could convey. Nassim is obsessed with using large words when a simpler, clearer word would do twice as well. Many sentences should have been cut out. For example:
"I said that I will get into a more thorough examination in Part Three, so let us focus on epistemology for now and see how the distinction affects our knowledge."
What the hell is that? That offers absolutely no new information and doesn't clarify anything.
Nassim also loves using the same, pointless cliché sentence structures over and over. For instance, this cliché is used at least three times in the first 38 pages:
"X implies Y or maybe X doesn't imply Y!"
Wow, Nassim. Golf clap for you. "Maybe Fruit Loops are delicious. Or maybe they aren't ...
It's around this point that we start to get the idea that Friedman was kind of a dick.
The most bizarre part about it is that no one is paying for the product placement.
No, scratch that, the most bizarre part is that the protagonist sleeps with literally every single woman he meets that is roughly his age.
Steig has a bizarre obsession with product placement-style product listings. Salader doesn't just have a "laptop", she has an iBook that Steig goes to great lengths to spec out. How much RAM it has, how large the hard drive is, and so on. It's like watching a movie with infomercials built in.
Steig also horribly bungles Salanders so-called "hacker" skills. He botches it in all the usual half-ass writerly ways, so steel yourself for some cringe-worthy moments if you're in any way, shape, or form a technically-minded person.
Too true. There's a great essay in there somewhere, but instead you get 400 pages of some bombastic turd using all the large words he knows that he wields to great page-filling purposes but little actual illuminating or clarifying. I knew I had a dud in my hands when he started using Italian for basic words like, you know, "first" and "second". As if "primo" is so much better a choice than "first".