Is he smart or just a trickster? I honestly can't tell

the thing is people here have a more direct way to be arrogant, but the social rules are also different, so you can laugh at the face of that kind of arrogant person and they have to take it, and you can still walk away from the conversation being perfectly friendly with them

in the anglo world they get lost when somebody is directly arrogant because the social rules push you to be indirectly arrogant so people don't know how to respond to direct arrogance and get mad

I'm not gonna say there isn't a north-south difference in demeanor (and that it does have as a component the behavior you're talking about) but a lot of times it is used to defend someone being a shit with "that's just his southernness speaking" (taleb would probably mutter something about haplogroups)
IMO taleb is just a shit

This guy is lame as fuck. The fact that this lame arrogant dude is as praised as he is with his 'lmao you can't predict unpredictable' only tells you how lame and retarded our society is.

He's only mean in writing and only to people who meet certain criteria, mostly bullshit vendors. From experience he's a pretty affable guy irl as long as you don't get him going.

I skimmed this and it's clear this guy has either a very superficial or no understanding at all of Taleb.

>mmuh models suck but that doesn't mean we should abandon them if they're the best we can do!

Taleb isn't against all models, he's against using models as a replacement for logic, and is against the mentality that we should 'try our best' with models because as he has demonstrated, a bad model is often worse than no model at all.

>he wants to do away with math and replace it with pixie dust

Absolutely not, way to miss the point. His problem is not with the use of math in the field but the misapplication of math (again through the underutilization of logic, which is the foundation of mathematics rather than 'pixie dust'), and the utilization of math that fails to fully account for extreme events as part of predictive modeling. The point being that those extreme events are the things that actually matter.

>Taleb's books are designed to appeal to the masses who think they are so smart for 'getting' fat tails that the experts miss,when the people doing work in statistics already know about them

If they know about them why don't they act like they do? It's true that everyone in the field "knows" about fat tails, it's also true that they tend to pretend they don't exist and relegate their effects to some bullshit token asscover line buried somewhere in the conclusion.

>his ideas are great during the occasional downturn but otherwise he's a bear in a bull market!

That's the point lmao

Is he kind of saying, even if you have a 99.9% chance of winning, you should expect the 0.1% chance of losing to happen too?

He says a lot of things, but to elaborate on your statement, he'd say that if you have a 99.9% chance of winning $5 and a 0.1% chance of losing $5 million, you should pay more attention to the 0.1% than the 99%.

>lmao what is expected value

expected value as used in the financial system doesn't capture that potential massive loss, they look more 95% chance to gain $5 and 5% chance to lose 50 having completely exiled the 0.1% chance to the land of error and footnotes. Things generally look good until they suddenly don't and people start claiming it was a six sigma event they had no way of predicting, and then a year later everyone says lol it was so obvious everyone knew it was going to happen and all of us smart people saw it coming.

>U CANT KNOW NUFFIN BECAUSE OF UNPREDICTABILITY

i like taleb but he tends to apply his theories to every single thing so you have to pick & choose what you actually agree with

name 1 thing you disagree about

Him not being Arab

you got me there

incomprehensible grifter

Nobody likes an angry Arab.

>I skimmed this and it's clear this guy has either a very superficial or no understanding at all of Taleb.
No, the guy has an excellent understanding of Taleb's bs and the implications of his writing. You need to reread the link and learn how not to you contradict yourself with your responses. Taleb is a joke in the financial field, he is famous for turning dollars into cents with his failed Empirica fund.

Have read Black Swan and some of Antifragile, seems like an interesting guy although I am a brainlet with the maths so unable to confidently critique his finer points. I do like the mixture of the scientific and the anecdotal. He seems to hate all the right people, from spergy economists to lefty academics. If he lives by his virtues of skin in the game then I don't give a shit of people think he's rude or whatever. Fucking Fragilistas shitting their pants because their dreams of a deterministic, 'rational', progressive society are crumbling. His Intellectual Yet Idiot post on Medium was a riot.

>hating /ourguy/

He is 100% right about Dos Passos

>nasty egocentric

You've spent too much time with northern euros online

He's smart.

He's right on many things.

WE

its clear you don't actually understand the article you linked, because you can't even rebut the person who you are quoting

I swear there is some newspaper article from the 80s or 90s where he calls himself arab and not lebanese

Arabs are from Arabia. Calling the people they conquered "Arab" only validates that conquest.

The people who were there before the Arabs came will be there when that tide finally recedes.

I am not wasting my time if the guy only skimmed the article I linked, if he does not know Taleb's history, does not understand the basics of stat analysis or what quants actually do, and contradicts himself in all the points he makes