if you start from a position of disdain instead, you'll be able to move past thinking his works have enough value to suffer the bullshit antics and be well on your way to never thinking about him again except in passing social context.

taleb is ultimately just another LARPer. people get the impression that he's something more for ~4 basic reasons:

1. he's more verbal than them.

2. they don't know stats too good.

so, given a crisis of confidence in all statistical orthodoxy plus a guy who really really seems to talk like he knows about stats a lot, and whom others — who also don't know stats, but want social proof of reading & shit — say knows about stats, they have no choice but to remain agnostic or go along with taleb's dogmatic-sophist-monkey-dance.

3. they fail to appreciate that his depth of extended expertise is never more than ankle-deep, and breadth very agonizingly chosen so as to min-max in terms of knowledge required to signal learnedness to the unlearned.

he'll say some poncy shit like « flâneur » out of context just because his readers are unfamiliar with it. he'll go on seeming deep-dives about language evolution and community segregation in the spinning of statistical fables — and it'll be utter horseshit, but nobody reading him will suspect that, and anyone with the requisite expertise to debunk it line by line doesn't give a shit about him and has no incentive to do so: why debunk a LARPer whose entire shtick is being a cleverer obscurant than most with an institutionally-enabled gish gallop lifestyle?

4. academic culture is so actively pathetic and conflict-avoidant that it's trivial to come across as some sort of masculine breaker-of-chains figure merely by not sucking in the majority mould — sucking differently is sometimes sufficient, at this point.

just look at jordan peterson. i don't intend to imply that he sucks, but look at him, presentation-wise. dude's basically a couple slices of ham held up by suspenders wrapped in a blazer, mouth-hole cut out so wind can blow through, and he's hailed as some kind of triumphant anti-establishment figure simply because culture wars shit has gotten so farcical.

wonks are thrown off by taleb's eagerness to be crass in the middle of otherwise frou-frou discourse, and that's the only thing that gives it any influence — because he discards all epistemic norms in the process. he won't circle back for them if they wait it out, or otherwise re-engage like a good lad. he doesn't choose to be vulgar for shits and giggles while nevertheless maintaining soundness of argumentation, he does it simply as a short-circuiting mechanism.

the posturing is slumming to him: he's aping a working class affectation without the life experience of having an epistemic peer+ interrupt the ritual to physically dickslap him and then resume reasoned discussion.

you see it with the powerlifting posturing as well.

i mean, nobody gives a shit what some physically unremarkable old man lifts. not young girls who don't wanna fuck unremarkable old men, nor young powerlifting guys who don't wanna have their sets interrupted by some old poseur pretending to do a 2016 election exit poll so he can inevitably find that

HIGH T ⇒ TRUMP VOTER
LOW T ⇒ HILLURRY

LUK, A BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT
BUNCHA MATHEMATICA BULLSHIT ⇒ IMRITE
AND IT'S A PICTURE SOOOOO…
YOU CAN'T USE IT W/O TRANSCRIBING IT
DESPITE ALREADY KNOWING IT'S BULLSHIT
HEE HAW AREN'T I SUCH TROLE

GLOBALIST CUCKS BTFO BY #BLACKSWAN

(yeah, this refers to an actual thing⁽¹⁾ he did on twitter)

in fact, the only possible audience for such effete anti-intellectual snobbery is Young Male Scholars™, pencilneck NYU Stern dandies who can project aspirations onto such a transparently less-than-nothing caricature as taleb in the same way that lots of young guys get really into BEING LIBERTARIAN as a social posture & gender identity.

so taleb, then: a brand for dullwits, a statistician who squandered nigh-unsquanderably fortuitous career timing to shitpost about things he just read a single wikipedia entry on, a guy who needed to be spanked a lot more as a kid, gist him however you like.

it doesn't really matter how you do it, because he doesn't matter

____________________

¹ https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/814560759577513984