I've noticed a formula many seem to follow in drawing attention to ones self as a public intellectual:
1. Find some topic or idea that's interesting and fairly well-accepted but not receiving a lot of attention.
2. Claim ownership over the topic or idea as if the prior literature doesn't exist. Invent new terminology ideally; abandon existing terms to eliminate a trail to prior authors and ideas.
3. Present the idea or topic in a sensationalistic way.
4. When furor inevitably develops about lack of acknowledgement of previous writers and researchers and issues identified by them, frame argument as being about ad hominem critics versus solidity of your own arguments. Sidestep actual criticisms.
As a research psychologist, I found his rant particularly upsetting because the very thing he's ranting about has been dealt with in the social sciences for years and years and years.
One of the reasons this issue keeps recurring is because, taken to its logical conclusion, the "time" probability paradigm (to use his term, there are better terms that have been used) as applied to persons' behaviors, only applies to that single individual, which then leads to a sort of paradox. Although we might want to know the probabilities for Theodorus Ibn Warqa, this is in principle unknowable because there is only one Theodorus Ibn Warqa. So when he is ruined, you can in theory say nothing about Maximillian Samuel Warqa.
At some point you have to invoke a counterfactual of sorts, and use a different person as a substitute, and this is why the "ensemble" probability model is invoked.
Taleb is right that the consequences of a ruin event are different at the individual level, but so what? The cost estimate is different from the probability estimate. It's not like people don't understand this. Maybe in the strawman literature he reads, but not in what anyone else is thinking. What's more typical is a ruin event one way or a ruin event another.
This is difficult stuff if you go beyond the toy gambler scenario he's dealing with. Just for one example:
1. Find some topic or idea that's interesting and fairly well-accepted but not receiving a lot of attention. 2. Claim ownership over the topic or idea as if the prior literature doesn't exist. Invent new terminology ideally; abandon existing terms to eliminate a trail to prior authors and ideas. 3. Present the idea or topic in a sensationalistic way. 4. When furor inevitably develops about lack of acknowledgement of previous writers and researchers and issues identified by them, frame argument as being about ad hominem critics versus solidity of your own arguments. Sidestep actual criticisms.