I also found his arrogance in Black Swan insufferable - enough that I lost all taste for his writing. I saw him talk in person in my building when he was promoting Anti-Fragile, and I was also not impressed. Do you still recommend I read Fooled By Randomness?

Read Success and Luck by Robert Frank instead

I would.

Do you think highly of Mandebrot? Clearly a deep thinker. Most of his writings are filled with his self references.

My own academic papers have a decent number of self references, too. But there is an enormous difference between referencing your own work, and telling the reader that the author is brilliant and those other people over there are stupid.

Ok, so what your call be about Benoit pointing out how smart he is making me feel non-brilliant?

I am honestly not sure what you are saying. I never brought up Mandelbrot, only Taleb. (Although this is a curious example, since Taleb brings up Mandelbrot a lot.)

My clumsy attempt was to draw a parallel between to authors who do a comparable amount of self congratulation.

What so you think of this one star review of success and luck (from Aaron):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/0691167400/?filterByStar=one_...

I did not analyze it carefully, but he tears the book to bits.

It's a legitimate criticism, but he's arguing a strawman.

First off, the reviewer's coinflip analogy is deeply flawed. If you take a million draws from a binomial distribution, it's not going to end up the same as a million draws from an exponential distribution. That has an even deeper meaning when you, as an individual, are one random draw from said distribution, especially if you want to live in a society that considers itself "fair" (whatever that may mean).

Now Frank is not arguing against inequality. Frank is an economist, and almost no serious economist is against inequality as a whole concept (though many are against extreme inequality and, importantly, social immobility) because inequality is what you'd call "incentive compatible".

Frank's policy proposal is consistent and sane, but it will rub some the wrong way, as any policy proposal does. I'm certainly in favor of it; consumption is a better target for progressive taxation than most of what has been proposed this election season. That's the part that got the reviewer so riled up. I'm guessing the reviewer is not a professional economist.

The idea of a progressive consumption tax is consistent with microeconomic theory, too. People value things in an ordinal (not cardinal) manner, and at a sufficiently high level of income this means consumption has to be conspicuous to some degree (that's Veblen's whole insight).

Of course, political feasibility of the policy proposal is one thing, and certainly many worse policies are more politically feasible, as exemplified by how rubbed that reviewer has been by Frank's book.

The main difference between this book and Taleb's book is that Franks book is "Successful people are lucky, here's a policy proposal" and Taleb's book is "Successful people are lucky and also everyone is dumb and I'm so smart"

Okay, so I haven't read the book but I read the scathing review - and I think your rebuttal isn't quite fair.

You started to address the review but switched to ad hom attacks to discredit the reviewer - when in reality the reviewer is a past financial professor who works in risk management, and makes some very salient points about the logic behind the books claims.

Even what you say about sampling binomial vs. exponential populations isn't quite relevant, because as a coin or a person, you're not going to be switching between such distributions when sampling.

Sorry about the ad homs; the reviewer used moral/philosophical instead of technical reasons to argue against (except that point on simulations), so I assumed he was a riled up layperson. I read his review too fast, I guess.

The reviewer's point is this:

"Finally, the author is not asking me to personally give more money to the government, he wants me to support forcing other people to do it. But those other people have average luck, by definition "

But that's wrong; if the tax is progressive, and you take it as given that the successful are lucky, then you are in fact taxing the lucky with a progressive tax. The question is targeting the tax correctly.

The reviewer had a few more points than just that, such as how the author not only fails to point out that luck is correlated with success, but contradicts himself.

Even in that statement you quoted out of context, the reviewer is referring to how we all have the same amount of luck, so luck alone shouldn't be the basis for a progressive tax.

Now, there are good reasons for a progressive tax, but the reviewer is saying it doesn't justify ignoring illogical arguments in the book. Just because the conclusion is proven right somewhere else doesn't mean that all arguments for it are valid.

It's all about when it was done. Before the GFC everyone believed that if you were rich you were smart and the opposite. If you challenged this you were a loser.

Then along came a cranky old uncle, who had no business being in the building, except that he did.

Turns out he had a point and now we consider these ideas trivial.

Today if you say all people are born equal and deserve equal rights 99% of the world will agree. There was a time when this wasn't true.

What you say + when you say it = what it's worth