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

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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.

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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.

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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...