His facebook doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. It's full of vague availability-heuristic-targeting generalities.

"Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency equals what you wish to show your neighbor"

"The problem is that academics really think that nonacademics find them more intelligent than themselves",

etc

I've read black swan as well, and there were parts I didn't quite grok at the time (You cannot predict a black swan! etc)

My take is that he's a Malcolm Gladwell with numbers and therefore less easily takedownable but has the same model of "hold prestigious academic position, appear wise, publish book with simple principle, be easily referenceable by people who want to sound well-read" except he has lots of math and charts to point at lest anyone call him out on it.

Talebs problem is an intense narcissism, allied with strong intelligence, but not as strong as his narcissism would leave him to believe. So, we have to listen carefully to find his useful insights, while wading through the bombast.

Don't try to engage with him critically, but constructively, directly on the internets though, because he prefers acolytes to arguments!

I started reading that book and I thought he was a genius, but then, right abut the point where he starts bagging on the Uncertainty Principle, I realized that he's actually kind of an idiot.

The book does make a good point though.

Maybe I'm the idiot, but I found the book's point to be pretty trivial. "Sometimes unexpected things happen, and people are bad at expecting the unexpected" seems pretty damn trivial to me.

Maybe it's because I think like a programmer rather than a finance guy, but a large portion of what I do on a daily basis is about mitigating risk from the unknown. A programmer who only guards against known risks is going to get his ass handed to him sooner rather than later (these are the sorts of people who use blacklists and regexes to sanitize SQL). A finance guy who only guards against known risks is just playing the averages. My experience with traders is that they tend to be pretty abstracted from reality and like to impose rules and patterns where there are none. I can see why those sorts of people would find Taleb's work groundbreaking.

Taleb's undoubtedly intelligent, but I feel like he woke up one day, decided that he wanted to be a philosopher who brings wisdom to the masses, and built his temple on a mind-searingly obvious principle, which he now proclaims to be his great gift to humanity, for which he should be praised, hallowed be his name. The impression I got off of him was that he considers himself a prophet, imparting a word to the masses that the rest of us are just too stupid to recognize. Gag me.

I agree with you except that you left out the only really important (in my opinion) part of his pretty trivial message: "Sometimes unexpected things happen, and people are bad at expecting the unexpected, and then they FAIL TO NOTICE that they are bad at expecting the unexpected"

It can be difficult for folks (myself included!) to separate their message from their irascible personalities.. ;-)

But if we were good at noticing that we're bad at expecting the unexpected, then we would expect the unexpected, making it no longer really all that unexpected, no? His whole argument just felt tautological to me.

If you really try, for a long time, you can be that rational. Please note, however, that 99% of people are not that rational, and if you haven't realized it, you're also not that rational. (Neither am I! But at least I realize I have a problem... b^)

If none of this makes sense, take a look at the LessWrong site.

Not really a surprise for someone who was so in thrall to Benoît Mandelbrot, another world-class narcissist.

Here's Taleb on Mandelbrot: "[He] had perhaps more cumulative influence than any other single scientist in history, with the only close second, Isaac Newton."

That quote really says it all.

fascinating.