The Black Turkey

Check out Scott Locklin’s brutal takedown of our favorite blowhard, Nassim Taleb. The only part I disagree with it where Locklin calls Taleb a “good writer.” Here’s a sample:

Mountebanks like Taleb sell their wares by making the regular jamoke reading his books and essays feel fiendishly intelligent for understanding the concept of fat tails at the expense of all those pointy headed Ph.D.’s in the back room with their slide rules and white laboratory jackets. I think there would be a lot of social equity in doing this, except, the dudes in the white laboratory jackets are well aware of those fat tails. As such, Taleb is merely setting himself up as some sort of heretical alpha monkey of the quants for stating the obvious, the misleading, and occasionally the gratuitously wrong-headed and untrue.

Very true. The exact same could be said for Matt Taibbi.

Posted by on July 20th, 2009 at 7:48 pm


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