If that is pseudo intellectual for you, you are too rich. Lets not forget his success as bond trader and his fund making massive sums of money in market volatility.

That article is a prime example of pseudo intellectualism, mostly because he lumps all GMOs in one big bucket, there's no general characteristic yet he and co-authors forces one. No wonder it's "only" on arxiv and hasn't made it anywhere else (look at the endorsers: https://arxiv.org/auth/show-endorsers/1410.5787 )

A rebuttal did however make it into a journal: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v33/n9/full/nbt.3333.html

But Taleb's current position is way more conservative than that stance!

Edit: I think this commenter gave a more "Talebian" response to GMOs (despite not having read the book): basically, let them exist, but make it easy for people to opt out in favor of foods with a longer track record. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506599

Without accurate information, you can't know if your corn flakes were made with GMOs or not.

Nature is "a journal" like the Pyramids are "a stone pile".

Pinker: Descriptively, there is less violence in the world today than at any time in recorded human history.

Taleb: How can you claim that we are in a "Long Peace"? There could be a huge terrorist attack tomorrow!

Pinker: I'm not making predictions, I am describing the world as it currently is. The "Long Peace" is a term used by historians to describe post-1945, not a predictive one to describe what will happen in the future.

Taleb: Violence is fat-tailed, nuclear bombs could kill millions of people instantly tomorrow, if you say violence is down you are statistically incompetent. See for example: https://www.facebook.com/13012333374/posts/10151641931853375

According to Taleb, a descriptive book of hundreds of pages of data is insufficient conclusion to say, descriptively, that violence is lower than in the past.

which claims that while his fund may have under-performed other funds over its lifetime and suffered a couple of years of modest losses during a period of stable growth, it did make massive returns during the dot.com crash which was kind of the funds raison d'etre.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wait-before-you-invest-in-nas...

Plus the fact that he started an new fund in 2009 that essentially was relying on hyperinflation to make their returns;

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124380234786770027#mod=testMod

See http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/30/the-taleb-g...