Taleb: The Only Man Who Has a Clue

The problem I see with Taleb is that people see him as the kid who cries 'wolf' too much, unfortunately. Other people see him as someone, like a stopped clock, is right twice a day.

It's unfortunate, because he probably has valid contributions to make now that we are in the exact scenario he was built for. But he has lost a lot of credibility in the years leading up to it, rightly or wrongly.

Taleb has to be one of the most narcissistic people in the world.

I remember reading "The Art of Thinking Clearly" by Rolf Dobelli, and there's a sentence in one of the chapters where says something like "no one could have predicted to 2007 housing crash (except Nassim Taleb)." Well, turns out that Dobelli is a "protege" of Taleb, and I can just see Taleb editing this manuscript and cajoling Dobelli into adding the parenthetical.

As such, I break out in hives whenever Taleb's name comes up. Even if he's right some of the time, I still can't listen to a thing he says.

The point about GMO is itself clueless.

Breeding, crop hybrid breeding, other natural recombination techniques, directed evolution and different types of GMO are just generic techniques for the same result.

The risk is in specific organisms and regulating them. How you achieve it does not matter. If you produce harmful organism using natural recombination techniques it's just as scary.

TL;DR: “Epidemiologists don’t understand epistemology so listen to me instead”