The author claims almost immediately that:
"Taleb’s style is to severely criticize experts and authorities--lots of 'morons', 'idiots', and 'fools' out there--while implying that both he and his reader or listener are exempt from their many biases."
Actually, Taleb continuously laments how amazingly difficult it is to stay objective and analytical, especially when it comes to assessing risk.
Taleb's key point however, was that existing economic models depend on using Gaussians for modeling probability distributions, but that Gaussians are only useful in SOME cases. Real world behaviorally driven events rarely fit into a neat statistical framework, so don't try and force them to, you'll just get bad results out of your model.
I would recommend reading his fooled by randomness book as well (and I may be remembering details from that one as well in this comment).
Actually, Taleb continuously laments how amazingly difficult it is to stay objective and analytical, especially when it comes to assessing risk.
Taleb's key point however, was that existing economic models depend on using Gaussians for modeling probability distributions, but that Gaussians are only useful in SOME cases. Real world behaviorally driven events rarely fit into a neat statistical framework, so don't try and force them to, you'll just get bad results out of your model.
I would recommend reading his fooled by randomness book as well (and I may be remembering details from that one as well in this comment).