Thanks for the link. Just ‘flipped’ through the first few pages and my blood pressure is already way up.. the guy just can’t help himself antagonize his readers. It’s going to be a tough read..
The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes that it would be very good for book sales.
All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them: since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a persona, and he's a very good method actor.
We get it, you don't like academics and The Establishment. But do you have to mention it every other paragraph like a teenage boy?
Guess nobody gave him the Kill Your Darlings writing advice.
For each their own I suppose. I found it unnecessary and also entertaining.
He takes the swipes, but he'll show up with a truckload of evidence supporting them if you push back.
While assuming normality will very often lead you to underestimate risk, fat tails can easily cause you to over estimate your risk.
Or think about the case of "robust" regression in which errors in a linear model are assumed to be from a fat tailed distribution like Student's T. This means that your model is not suprised by outliers. The consequence of this is that your model assumes that mode data is near the center and ignores extreme observations.
As a philosophical device fat tails are very helpful and interesting, but as a practical tool for modeling they are far from a panacea
I've not regretted reading some of his books, but I strongly advise anyone who wants to maintain some respect for him to avoid his Twitter feed at all costs. And I'm one of those highly analytical types that isn't overly burdened by emotional sensitivity. The man really is just that grating in real time. I get the impression that in his books he does some rewriting to limit his more egregious impulses.