I actually love Taleb's books (Black Swan, Antifragile). And I work with "data scientists", most with Ph.D.s, many in statistics.
I always talk about his book, but I cannot for the life of me find a single person who's even read it. I think: these are some the ONLY book about stats on the NY Times best seller lists (up until Nate Silver). And yet all these professionals have not only not read it, but barely even heard of it?
My hypothesis was that it is more popular on the East Coast than the West Coast (of the US). Are you from either of those places? I am originally from the east coast but work on the west coast. To hand wave a bit, I feel like west coast people are less into "ideas" and more into actions and experiences. Taleb's ideas do have somewhat of a nytimes-ish new yorker-ish east coast culture flavor. And a lot of people working in Silicon Valley are not really that interested in philosophy.
On the subject of his writing, I can totally see that people can be turned off by his writing. He can be arrogant and insulting. I find it kind of funny, but that's a matter of taste.
A few things I remember from his books that I really liked:
- The story of Nobel prize winner Myron Scholes, and namesake of the Black-Scholes equation, which I learned about in computational finance in college. He started a company "Long Term Capital Management", to monetize this ideas, and promptly lost billions of dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Scholes
That's not interesting? I think the difference between theory and practice is intensely interesting, and Taleb has a lot to say about it.
- I largely agree with his philosophy that people who claim to know things cause more harm than good. The downfall of Alan Greenspan and Bernanke is their arrogance. They think they can control the economy. But they can't and caused millions of people real harm.
- Respect for the old. For all its virtues, Silicon Valley does have a severe case of "neomania". Taleb's ideas about things that last apply to software too. Unix and C are going to be around a lot longer than say Hadoop or Puppet/Chef.
- The philosophy of fragility also applies to software in a straightforward way. Most people know this now, but you should continually expose your software to users and the market, not build up grand ideas in your head.
- actions over knowledge, i.e. people who know how to do things but not explain them
I could list a half a dozen more important ideas but I'll stop there.
I did write in my comments about this book that he overreached on his "trilogy" idea for the Antifragile. But I do like how he draws together a lot of seemingly disparate ideas that are philosophically related.