He strikes me as someone who is so desperate to be important and recognized that an assertion like this doesn't really surprise me.
"Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency equals what you wish to show your neighbor"
"The problem is that academics really think that nonacademics find them more intelligent than themselves",
etc
I've read black swan as well, and there were parts I didn't quite grok at the time (You cannot predict a black swan! etc)
My take is that he's a Malcolm Gladwell with numbers and therefore less easily takedownable but has the same model of "hold prestigious academic position, appear wise, publish book with simple principle, be easily referenceable by people who want to sound well-read" except he has lots of math and charts to point at lest anyone call him out on it.
Don't try to engage with him critically, but constructively, directly on the internets though, because he prefers acolytes to arguments!
The book does make a good point though.
Maybe it's because I think like a programmer rather than a finance guy, but a large portion of what I do on a daily basis is about mitigating risk from the unknown. A programmer who only guards against known risks is going to get his ass handed to him sooner rather than later (these are the sorts of people who use blacklists and regexes to sanitize SQL). A finance guy who only guards against known risks is just playing the averages. My experience with traders is that they tend to be pretty abstracted from reality and like to impose rules and patterns where there are none. I can see why those sorts of people would find Taleb's work groundbreaking.
Taleb's undoubtedly intelligent, but I feel like he woke up one day, decided that he wanted to be a philosopher who brings wisdom to the masses, and built his temple on a mind-searingly obvious principle, which he now proclaims to be his great gift to humanity, for which he should be praised, hallowed be his name. The impression I got off of him was that he considers himself a prophet, imparting a word to the masses that the rest of us are just too stupid to recognize. Gag me.
It can be difficult for folks (myself included!) to separate their message from their irascible personalities.. ;-)
If none of this makes sense, take a look at the LessWrong site.
Here's Taleb on Mandelbrot: "[He] had perhaps more cumulative influence than any other single scientist in history, with the only close second, Isaac Newton."
That quote really says it all.