FWIW, I'm from the west coast, but have spent the last several years in New York working with natural sciences students and post-docs. I might be what you would call an "ideas" person. Abstraction appeals to me. People in our department seem happier when their work is closer to physical observerations. Measuring stuff with yard sticks and radar: good. Getting big piles of data from other people, and doing stats: OK. Fitting a parematerized model to someone else's data: healthy skepticism. Of course healthy skepticism is generally cultivated.
It wouldn't be surprising if our friends reading lists (and reactions) depend on what they do for living. Did you meet a lot of people in finance or economics on the east coast? Maybe people's professions are spatially correlated.
My peers seem to treat models cautiously (including their own), and have tended to respond to abstract economic ideas with measured skepticism. I can't speak for them, but I sometimes perceive that economic arguments are suspected of being insufficiently empirical and subject to ulterior motives. Which, it seems, is at least a part of what Taleb is complaining about. Obviously these things can be true of any kind of argument, I'm just reporting my impression. Anyhow, it would be easier to listen Taleb if his tone was more restrained.
Most of the economists I have paid attention to (which are not near as many as I would like) seemed inclined to provocation. Sowell in "Basic Economics", and Friedman in his speeches (I haven't read his papers) tend to poke fun at their fellow citizens, for example. I think they sometimes alienate those outside their discipline because of this. It makes reading fun though. I find Friedman very amusing, and I think so does he.