For me, Nassim Taleb fits into the same sort of cosmology as LessWrong or other attempts to re-create reality models from whole cloth.
At some point, the creator tries to exercise creative control by using whatever concepts they've (re)imagined in ever-more-creative ways.
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Taleb: "Meditation is not Lindy. Try walking."
Also Taleb: "My magnum opus is Lindy because it hasn't declined too much in sales over 19 years."
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These are marketing terms or shibboleths, not ideas.
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Nietzsche and the Abyss, but for hacks.
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There is a useful intellectual maturing process here, for those who get sucked in:
Going from getting caught on the good ideas, taking the good with the bad, to realizing that some good individual points does not a coherent system make.
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Much of their critical output is essentially correct, if sometimes overstated.
Yes, economics really is mostly fraud.
Yes, finance really does reward lucky idiots quite often, and survival > short-term profit.
Yes, Monsanto really is a really bad company.
Fuck Saudi Arabia
Etc.
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The problem comes when, seeing that they can establish some things that are wrong, one thinks they can establish what is right.
This is much, much more challenging, and it is far easier to go wrong *creating* models and systems than finding the faults in them.
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Which is not to say that it isn't necessary work, or that we should attempt to dissuade people who make errors or inconsistent judgements from participating.
Rather, just add a lot of salt for positive statements.
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By the way, I think it isn't really fair to criticize repetitions of old ideas, unless they are presented as Totally New and Different.
Human cultural memory is short - far too short. We need people to repeat the same old ideas if we want to maintain any real forward velocity.
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Academics in particular seem really attached to this idea that every finding presented in any intellectual work ever has to be significantly original.
Good originality isn't much use if it reaches, say, 50 people. Popularity for good ideas is crucially important.
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If you want ideas to have cultural impact that isn't kept alive by top-down imposition (and thus fragile), it has to be explicable even to morons.
Taleb hardly invented black swans, but popularizing the concept down to "good money does not mean smart investor" is necessary work.