Nassim Taleb is a good rock thrower, he will point out flaws in things like no one else. He can pin point why a model/theory will breakdown, and under what conditions it will break down. He is pretty good at being skeptical towards lots of commonly held ideas what about you can and you can't do with mathematics and statistics.
What Taleb is bad at is communicating. His first step after he disagrees with someone is to offend that person in the internet. That's just not a productive way to get anything done. He complained that Piketty didnt listen to him when he criticized and found flaws in his math relating to that the income concentration work of the "Capital in the twenty-first century" book. Yet, if you look the way Taleb goes about trying to implement change (first call them idiots, then yell at them, etc), its not a surprise he can't get anything done. Remember when Reinhardt and Rogoff had an excel error in their work? The flaw was pointed out by a student who requested the data directly from them. I doubt that student called them idiots or tried to attack them. He just did good work and as a result R&R published a corrected update.
Why does Taleb does this? I think its because he is more of an activist than a theorist. He is more interested in throwing rocks and venting than actually to get anything done. The reasons I dont fully know but the net effect is that one has to be VERY careful when reading his work. If he has something good to say about Harry Markowitz (and I'm sure he has since diversification has been proven deeply) he wont tell you, because he has an 'activist' image to protect. If the use of Standard Deviation is good in certain situations, he also wont tell you, you will only hear the criticism. Furthermore, if you read his work without paying attention to EXACTLY what he is saying (and what he is not) you will get a false impression about what he thinks of things. Markowitz is an example, Taleb has criticisms relating to SPECIFIC applications to Modern Portfolio Theory, not ALL applications of Modern Portfolio Theory. But because you only read criticism, you might end up thinking MPT is terrible. But there are some good things in it, Ray Dalio is an example of someone who used that theory to build investment strategies that actually DECREASE tail risk.
As a result of all of this, take what Taleb writes with a grain of salt, he will be an activist more often than a theorist. And when he is being a theorist, you will only hear one side of the story. If you don't pay attention to details deeply, you might end up not exploring topics that are quite important in risk management. All because you thought they were not worth exploring after Taleb went on a rant against it on Twitter
What Taleb is bad at is communicating. His first step after he disagrees with someone is to offend that person in the internet. That's just not a productive way to get anything done. He complained that Piketty didnt listen to him when he criticized and found flaws in his math relating to that the income concentration work of the "Capital in the twenty-first century" book. Yet, if you look the way Taleb goes about trying to implement change (first call them idiots, then yell at them, etc), its not a surprise he can't get anything done. Remember when Reinhardt and Rogoff had an excel error in their work? The flaw was pointed out by a student who requested the data directly from them. I doubt that student called them idiots or tried to attack them. He just did good work and as a result R&R published a corrected update.
Why does Taleb does this? I think its because he is more of an activist than a theorist. He is more interested in throwing rocks and venting than actually to get anything done. The reasons I dont fully know but the net effect is that one has to be VERY careful when reading his work. If he has something good to say about Harry Markowitz (and I'm sure he has since diversification has been proven deeply) he wont tell you, because he has an 'activist' image to protect. If the use of Standard Deviation is good in certain situations, he also wont tell you, you will only hear the criticism. Furthermore, if you read his work without paying attention to EXACTLY what he is saying (and what he is not) you will get a false impression about what he thinks of things. Markowitz is an example, Taleb has criticisms relating to SPECIFIC applications to Modern Portfolio Theory, not ALL applications of Modern Portfolio Theory. But because you only read criticism, you might end up thinking MPT is terrible. But there are some good things in it, Ray Dalio is an example of someone who used that theory to build investment strategies that actually DECREASE tail risk.
As a result of all of this, take what Taleb writes with a grain of salt, he will be an activist more often than a theorist. And when he is being a theorist, you will only hear one side of the story. If you don't pay attention to details deeply, you might end up not exploring topics that are quite important in risk management. All because you thought they were not worth exploring after Taleb went on a rant against it on Twitter
