Wow. Referring to Nassim Taleb just by his last name? Has he really attained that level of status? He doesn't deserve it IMO, especially around here, with his fearmongering about GMOs and his debate style on twitter.
If you dislike him that much, call him NNT. It's a fun way of trivializing what he says.
I actually think Taleb some very important things to say. Or at least, he seems to be the loudest and most popular of the folks who are talking about epistemology, and it's an important topic. I think it's reasonable to call him Taleb, without specifying a first name, because there's no other Taleb that makes sense in this context (no other Talebs that have authored a book called "Antifragile"). You didn't experience any confusion, did you?
Taleb is an important living person. Whether or not you agree with him or even like the guy, you oughta admit that his reputation is significant. Seems like you knew who was being referred to, didn't you?
He has a perfectly legitimate argument against GMOs. If you don't agree with his argument that's one thing. But this sort of argumentation style, the same type of ad-homniem attack employed to discredit people by labeling them conspiracy theorists when the don't go with some status quo usually corporatist agenda, must stop. It's lazy and dumb.
I'm completely with yoi about his GMO stance and debate style, but (1) being write or wrong is not correlated to being famous or not (Hitler), and (2) he was right about many other things, and deserves respect for that.