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this sounds fun: "Taleb is one of many best-selling authors I don't enjoy, but as he is prolix, pretentious, petulant and clueless, I enjoy commenting on his latest blather" http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/taleb-mishandles-fragility.html …

"The book is really a big spread argument that it's good to be long gamma, bad to be short it. ... Whether or not this theta is adequate for the gamma is whether an option is priced fairly or not, and asymmetric payoffs are never priced at zero."

imo argument is basically that taleb is arguing that exposure to god is awesome but that when and if god replies is tbd and cannot be bought.

"One key to understanding Taleb is the Freudian concept of projection: he applies his greatest faults to others.. It's like a guy who says corn prices might increase because of risk from floods, and when a collapse in the dollar causes its price to rise, states, 'I told you so'"

"Hindsight bias, name dropping, and pretentious mathematics are all Taleb signatures he sees everywhere in others." i cat & no good at math enough to know if pretentious or not : (

"Many of his arguments are contradictory, but he escapes this via the common method of postmodern critical theory which is to claim one's understanding of individual parts of a text is only understood in the context of the whole, which also is dependent on the parts"

"I actually agree with a lot of Taleb, such as the intractability of risk because it is endogenous, and he's somewhat of a libertarian as I am, but he says so many inconsistent things it doesn't mean anything (when he's right it's probably a good example of the Gettier problem)."

argument here is that you can never know when you are right or you are wrong. (e.g. chinese horse story) arrogance shouldn't be built on statements that can always be interpreted as 'right'.