In Mr. Taleb’s view, “We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything” by “suppressing randomness and volatility,” much the way that “systematically preventing forest fires from taking place ‘to be safe’ makes the big one much worse.” In fact, he says, top-down efforts to eliminate volatility (whether in the form of “neurotically overprotective parents” or the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s trying to smooth out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system) end up making things more fragile, not less. Overtreatment of illness or physical problems, he suggests, can lead to medical error, much the way that American support of dictatorial regimes “for the sake of stability” abroad can lead to “chaos after a revolution.”

This is the central argument — the naked Christmas tree, as it were — in this highly discursive book, which proceeds to hang every sort of intellectual garland and philosophical ornament on its branches. Not only is “Antifragile” wildly ambitious and multidisciplinary, addressing issues in the realms of politics, economics, social policy, philosophy and medicine, but it also suffers from a kind of attention-deficit disorder, jumping from subject to subject, while continually looping back on itself. It’s a book that could have benefited enormously from some judicious editing.

Mr. Taleb — who has worked as a derivatives trader and quantitative analyst, and who holds the title of distinguished professor of risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University — writes with great certainty and vigor. At his best he serves up provocative theories that encourage us to look at the world anew. He reminds us of the limits of Enlightenment reason, goads us into thinking about why small might be less fragile than big (a rule, he implies, that applies to animals and corporations alike) and gives us a renewed appreciation of practical knowledge (of the sort possessed by engineers and entrepreneurs) as opposed to the sort of academic knowledge acquired in school.

Unfortunately he delivers such lessons with bullying grandiosity and off-putting, self-dramatizing asides. He boasts about being able to dead lift 330 pounds and about being an “an intellectual who has the appearance of a bodyguard.” He also boasts about uncovering ideas in the philosopher Seneca’s work that no other commentators have recognized.