[nemo44x]

Sam Harris isn't impressed with him:

> I know many of you love this guy, and think he's a genius. I can assure you, none among you, are as impressed with his intelligence as he is. This guy is just insufferable. I've actually never witnessed a marriage of incompetence and confidence so fully and grotesquely consummated in the mind of a person with a public platform.

> This is the most arrogant person I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. When you meet him you quickly discover that he radiates a sense of grievance from his pores in a way that few people do. It's kind of like a preternatural force of negative charisma.

> He is a child in a man's body. And the mismatch between his estimation of himself and the quality of his utterances is so complete and so mortifying to witness in person that you just find you're jumping out of your skin.

[angiosperm]

Sam Harris, you say.

[nemo44x]

Well yeah, there is that.

I love Taleb's writing (Black Swan was an important book) and observations (Power law distributions are the world globalization trends towards) but truth be told he does come off as a bit of an ass. I mean, he really just had the key observation and then somehow wrote a few thousand pages around it and more or less got lucky with a trade once.

[pdimitar]

> but truth be told he does come off as a bit of an ass.

Being able to look past that is what constitutes one of the meanings of the expression "going out of your comfort zone" which is basically how you learn new things.

Like your sibling commenter, I distill wisdom and experience any chance I get. If I find myself being irritated by somebody, my first reaction is to ask myself why. If the reason is emotional I almost always dismiss it.

[angiosperm]

I take wisdom where I can find it, and leave the rest.

I wouldn't want as much attention on my flaws as his get.

[nemo44x]

> I take wisdom where I can find it, and leave the rest.

Good philosophy.