Besides the problems I have with Taleb I'm happy that the OP had the courage to quit his job and that it worked out. Courage is a good charater trait, and in this case it got rewarded.
It's funny; but it's an uncharitable summary if you're going to use that as a basis for evaluating Taleb's ideas.
But you should of course take it with a grain of salt, since I used this word itself to mock Taleb, implying that his work can be summarised in a short Guardian parody piece.
1) We know one of the Roman governors was from Africa, but don't know his ethnicity
2) Maybe [something about recessive genes I think] the DNA aged out of the record
3) Maybe most of the Romans went home at the end of the occupation!!!!!!! This one made me think of that Feymnan trait of complete skepticism. Taleb seemed to struggle with the idea that there is not much firm proof of anything that happened in Roman Britain, but not having firm evidence to back up your claim doesn't make you wrong.
It seemed to me, and this is only an impression, that the main problem Taleb had with her is that she was a woman, and a smart one too.
And it also seems that people like Pinker don't take him serious anymore (which seems to aggravate him even more).
PS: http://quixoticfinance.com/empty-statistics/ talks about the Taleb-Pinker feud and rebukes Taleb.
Feuds between intellectuals have been a staple for decades.
You are letting personality problems obscure insights.
This said, that doesn't mean he won't offer insight. It just that since I don't have time to read everything, I'll use my heuristic method to look for potential places for insight. In this case it would rather lead me to Pinker et al.
Then my question to you would be why do you feel that? Is it based on evidence?
Many of the worlds greatest scientists and philosophers have been jerks e.g. Aristotle was a massive sexist.
Or look at the long list of geniuses who were unstable like Galois.
Taleb has always put his money where his mouth is - to me that's a better indicator than poor manners.
Well signaling is a thing thats been developed since humanity exists. For me thats evidence enough. If singaling would be inefficent, it would not still be such an important factor in human interaction.
It's the same with job interviews. No matter how smart you are, you better be on time and show some manners. Because if you don't, you'll be asked: "If you are that smart, why don't you understand that you are not getting a job this way?" and frankly, there's not a good anwser to that.
That really depends.
If you avoid a bad hire 10% of the time by rejecting everyone who is late then that can be a good trade off for you even though you have rejected many great candidates. There is a significant cost to a bad hire.
On the other hand you can read a chapter of a book at your local library for free and for a minimal time investment and then decide if you want to keep reading it.
I'd rate Talebs work as significantly more influential and insightful than Pinkers although I agree with Pinker more often.
And here's an article about the debate/noise: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna-roma...
Beard's point seems to be that ethnic and geographic diversity of some sort did exist and the kind of thing portrayed in the show is not entirely impossible, while Taleb's point seems to be that a family of “black” and “white” people would not be a typical one and that these modern racial categories are different from those of the time. The Atlantic article puts this in context and says why the positions are not inconsistent.
Talebs point is the public is being mislead by taking an incredibly unlikely scenario and treating it as likely and common.
Mary's rebuttal was that it's not an impossible scenario.