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"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'.

"Taleb himself was in there angrily responding at length to negative reviews, and his cult-like fans piled on. From a guy who writes in Antifragile that criticism should be welcomed, his response to criticism is consistently hysterical."

"Then, note that his big idea on mental illnesses is that people should not over-diagnose or overtreat them. True enough, given the meaning of the prefix "over", but if that's his point it's tautological."

the lottery ticket analogy is strawman since it has expected return. personal summary: taleb is arguing for less reliance on risk-management models b/c they don't account for God falkenstein is saying that these models are all we have & are better than prayer