[naradaellis]

Are you not allowed to call bullshit on something unless you can do better? I believe the contrary; I think that reading around and saying "You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. Here are citations to show you're wrong" is actually a very valuable contribution to science and society -- what are the point of such models if they don't work?

The difference between Newton and the securities traders that Taleb dislikes is that Newton actually managed to predict things with certainty. A large part of the Black Swan is Taleb pointing out that barely any retrospective review is done on predictive models.

[_debug_]

> is actually a very valuable contribution to science and society -- what are the point of such models if they don't work

Agreed. Some papers just say, "We tried this and it doesn't work", and that's a contribution, too.

I would just like to point out that there is a good amount of unwarranted drama that overemphasizes his contribution and unnecessarily attacks fundamental contributions like the Black-Scholes model. It's especially appealing to the larger public who are looking for a black & white "us vs. them" simplified explanation for the financial crisis.