Yeah, Taleb is a tough one. His books and ideas have done more to change my thinking than almost anything else I have read. I recently got through Skin in the G

Yeah, Taleb is a tough one. His books and ideas have done more to change my thinking than almost anything else I have read. I recently got through Skin in the Game (finally!) adn it was head exploding especially in the light of Covid-19. I would rank it above his other books though he ranks Anti-Fragile as his most important work. Some reasons Taleb comes off as so intransigent and just obstinate in real-life is two fold - 1) He sees as profoundly evil the privatization of profits and socialization of risks (banks) and sees "no consequence" professions - economists, experts, bureaucrats, war mongers, politicians and intellectuals as deeply unethical and predatory. 2) He went through a phase which he talks about in Anti Fragile, after the publication of Black Swan that he actually had to get security and was broadly shunned by the financial and intellectual elite which went against them. He is also independently wealthy and has learnt to inoculate himself to the circular congratulatory world of honors, awards, citations etc. Taleb has been right about a lot of things and obviously wrong about few. However that is a difficult yardstick to measure on when the events he is talking about unfold once every 100 years or longer. It takes immense courage to make a stand on things that might never happen in your lifetime. For example he has been talking about the risks of pandemics for years and wrote a very prescient piece on Covid-19 in Jan. Now, China could have very well stopped Covid-19 in its tracks like they did SARs and we would have been spared and he would have looked like a fear monger. However it was the right call for Taleb to make and that is true courage. I began reading Taleb when Fooled by Randomness came out in the early 200s. Read The Black Swan and then stopped because I did not find his work prescriptive. Recently got through the rest of his books and wished I had read them much much earlier. Now I plan to re-read them every two years. Most intellectuals, including the general population of HN, have an almost allergic reaction to Taleb. They find him pompous, insufferable, unscientific, unoriginal and the rest. To each his own but it would behoove anyone who generally cares about how the world works to give the Incerto a read with an open mind. BTW he is hugely bullish on the value of startups to both individuals and society (Anti-Fragile and Skin In the Game).