Taleb acts as though the finance community doesn't know what a fat tail is, or how to model it. Yes, there are idiotic statistical practices used in the business world (VAR comes to mind) but the best hedge funds employ the types of top mathematics PhDs that understand the concepts and implementation quite well. I've worked with them in the past and it would be a mistake to discard their thinking as trivial or amateurish.
Mediaman is right that there are people in finance that understand fat tails. I would say that Taleb along with Espen Haug, and Pablo Triana would agree. The issue is the theory. Actual practitioners do not have the luxury of believing in things that don't work.
He writes from his head. He doesn't go digging through books looking for choice quotes to sprinkle throughout the text and make it appear more intelligent. I don't care if his ideas come from a lot of different sources. He synthesizes them very well.
The alternative way of writing really irritates me now. For instance, I was just reading "Poverty in America". The book literally starts by saying something like:
-In 1979 the government official in charge of fighting poverty in America stated, "Poverty will be extinct in 10 years." But it hasn't happened...blah blah
The whole book starts with some quote that is so shaky. Who is this guy who said it? Was he sober or drunk when he said it? What was the context? What did he mean by "extinct" and "poverty".
I love Taleb because he doesn't just snatch things out of context to help bolster his arguments. He thinks up his own stuff. He puts everything in his words. If you don't understand something enough that you can't fluidly describe it in your own words, you shouldn't be writing about it. I think PG's essays also are almost entirely in his own words, which is one of the reasons why they are generally so logical and clear.
Also, the disparaging is well deserved IMO. I think it's more than warranted to disparage people who don't understand statistics who are supposed to. At the very least, people who understand stat/prob should take themselves much less seriously than they do. I know it is very hard to always speak with correct probabilistic language, humans are programmed to speak in stories and not probability, but there should be a greater acknowledgement of this by financial, media, and other professionals. Until that happens disparage all you want.