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I like Taleb's books. His ideas are far from novel -- especially to people who work with complex systems -- but his books are engaging. When I read them, I rarely find that I'm impressed by anything he said, yet I'm _always_ inspired to explore some tangent, which I think is very valuable. However, you have to take him with a grain of salt. The arrogance is a bit much.

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> The arrogance is a bit much.

I read the first book. The arrogance was a bit much, especially in a book where he's talking about the importance of randomness. But, like you, I did go off an explore about a lot of what he said. So it's a fun exercise.

There are a few great books which are too repetitive. "Black Swan" is one; he could have got all of that into a book a quarter the size and not lost much important. Another one is "Reckoning with Risk" by Gerd Giggerenzer - he takes many chapters to say people don't understand percentages, and you should really use "X people out of 10,000" when explaining risk to people.

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