[o09rdk]

Eh. I admit I have a complex with Taleb. It's not just his narcissism per se, although there's that too: he's just wrong about a lot of stuff, and other times fails to recognize how old his ideas are. He gets over his head sometimes, assuming because it sprung forth in his head there haven't been 100s of other people working on it over the years who addressed whatever idea he had decades ago.

Other times he's spot on. Usually it's not anything actually new, but he deserves some credit for being such a bulldog about it.

[andreilys]

Curious to hear which of his points you think are wrong?

[o09rdk]

I don't follow him regularly unless something he's saying comes up somehow, at which point I kinda look into him again.

He's famous for lambasting psychology, some of which is deserved, but some of which is just ignorant. Earlier this year he started complaining about psychologists ignoring long-tailed/skewed distributions, which is so absurd and widely written about I don't even know where to start, as it's a basic corollary of a lot of modern models. He also selectively miscites literature; god forbid he should do a systematic meta-analysis.

More of my concern is reinventing the wheel. I think he deserves a lot of credit for drawing attention to wrong models and assumptions in economics but model misspecification has been a topic that's been written about for decades in the statistics literature (e.g., "all models are wrong but some are useful", sandwich error estimators, pseudolikelihood ratio, model averaging, the work of Dawes, etc.). I agree with the general point he's making with these types of things, but his discussions would be a lot more interesting if he gave credit where it's due, expanding on others' past work rather than burying it.

Mostly I wish he'd tone himself down a bit, to get his signal:noise ratio in a better place. But then maybe he wouldn't draw attention to some of these issues.

[narcindin]

I agree with your criticisms. But currently the world would be better if there were more people like him, not less.

[misiti3780]

what is he wrong about from blank swan or antifragile (just curious)?