I am not sure what would convince you otherwise though, since it seems like you have made up your mind already. Please loosen up on the snark.
And yes, I've seen a lot of claims of various other successes of Taleb, with a lack of any actual citations or proof at all: His own fund folded after yielding mediocre returns, and then he started consulting for a fund that seems to demonstrate a tremendous amount of bluster, with some curious and cringe-inducing ways of reporting returns, the narrative reading like the story of a gambler, telling you with great pride about the 35:1 payout on their roulette bets, skipping over the 0:37 payout on all their other bets.
I've worked with a large number of hedge funds, many of whom made a lot of money in 2008. You haven't heard a word from them because they have no need to do PR or to pitch the one bet they made right. I become suspicious of any who does.
And the danger of Taleb's lucky bet was that he is listened to as an expert, at least by some. Virtually everything he had to say about government intervention after the financial crash has been proven fundamentally wrong -- actual reality demonstrated that. Thankfully a lot of people didn't listen to him.
For instance if you asked 1000 people to guess coin flips, on average one half will be wrong on each flip. So on the first flip you'd drop to 500, then 250, then 125, then 65, then 32, then 16, then 8, then 4, then 2, then you'd -- in a perfectly ideal scenario -- have one person left. A person that remarkably, "against all odds", guessed 10 coin flips in a row right! Surely they must be some sort of magician or seer, right? Yet their probability of guessing the next coin flip is no better than the people eliminated in the first round.
But that is exactly what we do with things like exceptional events: We find the person who was right about a set of events, among a collection of people guessing almost everything, and assume they've cracked the code. Even outside of financial situations (like being a guy who happened to have a portfolio that did great during an extreme black swan on October 19th, 1987, even if that same portfolio generally did terribly), just look at what happened with 9/11: Of all of the millions of scenarios that people concocted for fiction or just postulating, anyone who talked about a plane hitting the WTC suddenly became prophetic.
It's actually a pretty good book, as an aside.
For instance, Taleb's example of fund managers that beat the market for five years in a row. You start with a cohort of 10,000 and a 50% chance of beating the market each year. There will be a group of 300 or so fund managers that consistently beat the market 5 years in a row. This does not differentiate the lucky from the skillful. 1) Analyzing other cohorts that had higher success rates and 2) their investment strategies and decisions would be necessary to make the determination.
Well, a broken clock is right twice a day. Someone who always calls for a market correction will eventually be right. The real question is how will the investment strategy fair over decades or longer.
We may have different takeaways from the book. My takeaway was that one should invest in becoming skilled (learn strategies that work in the long run) rather than seeking or worshiping those who may just be lucky.