Taleb argues against R^2, and the author of this article seems to just ignore those points. I think Taleb has valid points, but the author here seems to be doing just the same conventional analysis that people writing psychology papers tend to do, which Taleb specifically argues is an invalid way of doing things (because assumptions built into linear correlation measures doesn't apply in this situation).

This is a really frustrating issue with criticism/response to Taleb.

Taleb: "There are problems with A because of B reasons"

Response: "B reasons prove A"

I really don't understand why this is so common. I don't fully agree w/ Taleb that the academic demographic he tends to pick on is so lost to navel-gazing that it is completely unable to understand the context of his arguments, but it's really odd how common this is.

To clarify, I'd love to see someone who actually understands Taleb's arguments to push back at him from the same premise. He says some really controversial (and potentially hugely important) stuff that needs to be challenged and peer-reviewed just to get a basic second opinion on it. This has yet to happen really because of what I described.

I used to think Taleb was too harsh on academics. Seeing how academics respond to his well-worked critiques, I now think he's not harsh enough.

His critique here isn't particularly well-worked. But the author here doesn't seem to have read his post....