Have you read his books (not just the summary but all the chapters)? While he has good points, he is so egotistical, self-absorbed, and full of pseudo-scientific theories (e.g. that one should go between gorging themselves on food and fasting) that it makes it hard to actually extract out the good parts.

Ya, it's really a shame. He's got some very interesting stuff to say, but he's such a completely insufferable jackass. It's really unfortunate. I manage to ignore it and enjoy his books anyway, but he's a pretty easy person to hate.

if you start from a position of disdain instead, you'll be able to move past thinking his works have enough value to suffer the bullshit antics and be well on your way to never thinking about him again except in passing social context.

taleb is ultimately just another LARPer. people get the impression that he's something more for ~4 basic reasons:

1. he's more verbal than them.

2. they don't know stats too good.

so, given a crisis of confidence in all statistical orthodoxy plus a guy who really really seems to talk like he knows about stats a lot, and whom others — who also don't know stats, but want social proof of reading & shit — say knows about stats, they have no choice but to remain agnostic or go along with taleb's dogmatic-sophist-monkey-dance.

3. they fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned.

he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context just because his readers are unfamiliar with it. he'll go on seeming deep-dives about language evolution and community segregation in the spinning of statistical fables — and it'll be utter horseshit, but nobody reading him will suspect that, and anyone with the requisite expertise to debunk it line by line doesn't give a shit about him and has no incentive to do so: why debunk a LARPer whose entire shtick is being a cleverer obscurant than most with an institutionally-enabled gish gallop lifestyle?

4. academic culture is so actively pathetic and conflict-avoidant that it's trivial to come across as some sort of masculine breaker-of-chains figure merely by not sucking in the majority mould — sucking differently is sometimes sufficient, at this point.

just look at jordan peterson. i don't intend to imply that he sucks, but look at him, presentation-wise. dude's basically a couple slices of ham held up by suspenders wrapped in a blazer, mouth-hole cut out so wind can blow through, and he's hailed as some kind of triumphant anti-establishment figure simply because culture wars shit has gotten so farcical.

wonks are thrown off by taleb's eagerness to be crass in the middle of otherwise frou-frou discourse, and that's the only thing that gives it any influence — because he discards all epistemic norms in the process. he won't circle back for them if they wait it out, or otherwise re-engage like a good lad. he doesn't choose to be vulgar for shits and giggles while nevertheless maintaining soundness of argumentation, he does it simply as a short-circuiting mechanism.

the posturing is slumming to him: he's aping a working class affectation without the life experience of having an epistemic peer+ interrupt the ritual to physically dickslap him and then resume reasoned discussion.

you see it with the powerlifting posturing as well.

i mean, nobody gives a shit what some physically unremarkable old man lifts. not young girls who don't wanna fuck unremarkable old men, nor young powerlifting guys who don't wanna have their sets interrupted by some old poseur pretending to do a 2016 election exit poll so he can inevitably find that

  HIGH T ⇒ TRUMP VOTER
  LOW T ⇒ HILLURRY
  
  LUK, A BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT
  BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT ⇒ IMRITE
  AND IT'S A PICTURE SOOOOO…
  YOU CAN'T USE IT W/O TRANSCRIBING IT
  DESPITE ALREADY KNOWING IT'S BULLSHIT
  HEE HAW AREN'T I SUCH TROLE
  
  GLOBALIST CUCKS BTFO BY #BLACKSWAN

(yeah, this refers to an actual thing⁽¹⁾ he did on twitter)

in fact, the only possible audience for such effete anti-intellectual snobbery is Young Male Scholars™, pencilneck NYU Stern dandies who can project aspirations onto such a transparently less-than-nothing caricature as taleb in the same way that lots of young guys get really into BEING LIBERTARIAN as a social posture & gender identity.

so taleb, then: a brand for dullwits, a statistician who squandered nigh-unsquanderably fortuitous career timing to shitpost about things he just read a single wikipedia entry on, a guy who needed to be spanked a lot more as a kid, gist him however you like.

it doesn't really matter how you do it, because he doesn't matter

____________________

¹ https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984

I don't disagree with your assessment of his character. But I do think that his insights about risk are, while not novel per se, are interesting. Particularly his concept of 'antifragility'. Now, is that a new idea? No. And it's likely not his idea, either, and he also thinks that it applies way more broadly than it actually does. He's a jackass. But the mental model supposed by Antifragile is an interesting and useful one, and I don't regret having waded through his idiocy to obtain it.

Thing is that he picks an organizing principle⁽¹⁾ and rides it into the ground, through the center of the earth, and back out the other side until eventually de-emphasizing it in favor of some new organizing principle more attractive to current audiences.

That is: there are geological layers of taleb based entirely in reader-response. He can't make his subject matter audience-invariant, because how it plays determines its significance to him: it's a feedback loop of bullshit by design. Right now all his acolytes can manage to sputter forth is acronymized slogans like SITG (skin in the game), so that's what he plays up. Formerly it was stuff like antifragility, etc. It just keeps devolving.

____________________

¹ http://enwp.org/organizing_principle

> Thing is that he picks an organizing principle⁽¹⁾ and rides it into the ground, through the center of the earth, and back out the other side until eventually de-emphasizing it in favor of some new organizing principle more attractive to current audiences.

I don't disagree, but I think that the organizing principles he's settled upon (by whatever process) are interesting.

the poetics of successful sophistry is a potential research topic in its own right, so sure

It is possible to find a man to be a jackass, and have a few interesting ideas simultaneously. You haven't attempted to criticize any of his actual ideas, just his presentation of them. A criticism I agree with, though in so doing you're really committing his own primary sin: Trying to defeat substance by criticizing style. If you've got specific gripes with his math, i'd be curious to hear that, or criticisms of his actual ideas i'd be curious to hear those too.

Trouble there is simple: academically, he hasn't really innovated anything substantial enough to bother discussing in isolation. I mean that in a purely descriptive sense.

Just take a look at his google scholar⁽¹⁾ or crossref search⁽²⁾ hits and gloss over the books, republications of books, translations of books. What remains are miscellaneous vagaries about tail risk etc. In particular, lots of reviews / position papers that amount to him just setting up strawmen to tear down.

That contrarian browbeating is what drove him to prominence. And in sole-author article form, the attendant research laziness manifests itself as junk like this⁽³⁾ thing that's lower quality discussion of the subject matter than a lot of replication forum posts.

____________________

¹ https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=64BtMdsAAAAJ

² https://search.crossref.org/?q=%2BNassim+%2BTaleb&type=Journ...

³ Taleb, N.N., 2016. The Meta-Distribution of Standard P-Values. SSRN. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2834266

So I guess you must have lots of examples of things he has said where he was dead wrong because he was out of his depth...

Yes, I read The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and Antifragile. I read all the way through them, I hail from a non-skimming age.

> At one point he was planning to publish a book of his own aphorisms, as quoted by himself, while he is still alive.

He did, it's called "The Bed of Procrustes". I quite enjoyed it, there's quite a few brilliant thoughts there, even though they're sprinkled between countless cheap shots against his enemies.

I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/21/bed-of-procrus...

Does he go into detail about these in his book? Some of these are clever but did he write some substance behind these quips? Asking, not accusing.

I believe that review is actually not quoting the book, but rather pretending to be in character as Taleb and making things up to mock him.

He has gone a bit off the deep end recently. I guess too much arguing with opponents radicalised him, similar to Dawkins.

IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an easy, entertaining read.

> IMHO his best book is his first mass market one: "Fooled by Randomness". It contains all the big ideas of his subsequent books and is an east, entertaining read.

Let me second this suggestion. "Fooled by Randomness" is great and I enjoyed it a lot. I've read it multiple times. I read the "The Black Swan" once and thought it was good. I did not finish "Antifragile".

Not really. I think he's starting to converge on "skin in the game" as a unifying thread for much of the other work. I could be wrong, but having read FBR and TBS, I don't recall seeing it put this simply ("skin in the game") until at least Antifragile, if not later. I view it as more of a progression.

Also, the style of the books is quite different. FBR is closer to a personal essay, whereas TBS is more of a mainstream nonfiction book, and Antifragile is the most philosophical/abstract.

I've read _The Black Swan_ and was disappointed. He repeats the same concept (that could have been easily expressed in a short article) again and again, while bragging about how clever, cool and refined he is.

One of the most obnoxious writers I know of.

To be fair, many many authors have posted books of their own aphorisms while still alive. For exmaple Nietzsche, Cioran, de La Rochefoucauld, et al.

See this wikipedia page for a list of all such authors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism

Nietzsche's aphoristic style was actually pretty effective. Taleb has this tendency to throw aphorisms out there and wait for his followers to get confused by them, at which point he revises them (or just explains them). It's hard to imagine most authors operating that way.

>>though it does seem to me he's set up something of a cottage industry churning the same general idea into a sequence of very similar books

True, he has, but his thoughts on randomness and such are very important. Yet, they don't seem to get through to the zeitgeist. In my view, he needs to publish a few more books on the subject to emphasise the point even more.

He reminds me of a professor that's always looking down on everyone because no one is smart enough. But, I'm a fan of his work and many of his views.

Taleb's approach is to put BS-vendors on full blast, especially if he sees them prominently spreading bad ideas and acting in bad faith. It's a service to all of us. The intellectual sphere is crowded enough already without the pundit class spreading misinformation.

There's something to be said for maintaining at least a semblance of decorum whilst going about his self-assigned mission to patrol the global marketplace of ideas. Sadly he just rants and raves like a ’jackass’ (as somebody else on this thread quite aptly noted).

And really, what gives him the right to act as the ultimate arbiter of what is, and what is not, ’bullshit’? What of his ongoing stream of pro-Flynn, pro-Scaramucci invective? What of the manner in which he flamed that historian?

I don't think 'rants and raves' is an accurate characterization. His declared modus operandi is to treat the spread of BS as an act of harm to the public which should be met with hostility when the offender is someone with a platform/megaphone. His attacks are usually pretty focussed on what he considers important issues. Is it more noble to keep quiet so that you get invited to more celebrity dinner parties?

Not sure what your complaint is exactly regarding Flynn/Scaramucci, can you elaborate? I recall him expressing appreciation for Flynn's opposition to the 'moderate rebels' of Syria, and saying something about Scaramucci being a 'doer' based on his personal interactions.

With Beard, he caught her spreading/supporting obvious BS, and presented her with the genetic counter-evidence. She didn't seem to understand this, and instead of admitting that or accepting/considering the evidence, she attempted a series of high-brow dismissal manoeuvres, back-pedalling, deferring to another blog... Taleb didn't get too insulting until she referred to his "pop risk" books, at which point he hit back harder.

I mean, you could say Taleb should be more respectful, but the fact is, these people will not stop spreading their BS unless someone calls them out on it in this manner, and that's a far bigger problem. I suppose what gives him the "right" to do this is that in many domains even the experts simply do not understand statistics and probability.

> With Beard, he caught her spreading/supporting obvious BS

She wasn't spreading bullshit. That example - a black roman soldier in roman Britain - actually happened.

> His declared modus operandi is to treat the spread of BS as an act of harm to the public which should be met with hostility

You make it sound like he never spreads bullshit, but he does, frequently. In this example he used bullshit of "we don't see the genes" - a point that got nicely debunked in a few places.

> Taleb didn't get too insulting until she referred to his "pop risk" books, at which point he hit back harder.

But those books are pop books. Why did he become unhinged after she called his pop books pop?

He's a fucking pompous blowhard.

> She wasn't spreading bullshit. That example - a black roman soldier in roman Britain - actually happened.

It was featured along with a caption describing it is a 'typical' family, making it ripe for mockery. A responsible historian might weigh in with something like "the scene depicted in the cartoon was improbable and definitely not typical, but not not completely outside the realm of possibility." Instead she weighed in with "pretty accurate, actually". Total BS.

> In this example he used bullshit of "we don't see the genes" - a point that got nicely debunked in a few places.

Did it? Link?

> But those books are pop books. Why did he become unhinged after she called his pop books pop?

In the context of the conversation "pop" is clearly a slur, inviting the sort of response it got.