HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

I don't think Taleb has engaged with academic philosophers. He prefers to portray himself as someone grounded in empiricism, and talks down "intellectual-yet-idiot" academics who lose the forest for the trees, in loving their flawed simplifications/abstractions more than the reality they are trying to model [1]. A lot of his ire is directed at economists' over-reliance on flawed mathematical assumptions (particularly relating to modeling randomness), and more broadly, academics in the less empirically grounded fields. I take his principal point to be that the modern approach to decision making under uncertainty (due to being neither theoretically nor empirically rigorous) is just a bunch of fashionable nonsense that has displaced several useful traditional/folk thumb rules which might superficially appear to conflict with the modern scientific models, but represent valuable insights won through hard experience. Most of his writing/speaking directed at a general audience is polemical, and often feels like he is ranting, so YMMV. If you're interested in getting a quick flavor of his work, try his talk at the National Science Foundation [2].

FWIW, several of Taleb's key points expound on some statements by Hume [3] and Seneca [4], so he does value certain works/ideas nominally considered philosophy.

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e... (Taleb shares several of his articles/book-excerpts on Medium)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omsYJBMoIJU

[3] https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MhC5tcEv0&feature=youtu.be...

PS: Having written this comment on HN makes me feel very weird, stating (my understanding of) the opinions of some particular person, but I just felt like responding to a sincere question.