You gotta love the acronyms: STD versus MAD! Taleb is definitely mad but his use of the MAD acronym (mean absolute deviation) is actually correct. However the

You gotta love the acronyms: STD versus MAD! Taleb is definitely mad but his use of the MAD acronym (mean absolute deviation) is actually correct. However the STD acronym (all caps) refers to "sexually transmitted disease" and not generally used for "standard deviation". Most people use SD, Stdev, StDev or sigma. Once again his ability to coin new terminology outstrips his ability to form coherent ideas that are anything more than trivial (eg. we have known about fat tails in stock returns for 50+ years). Like George Soros[1], Taleb's success says more about the state of the world of finance than their contributions to our knowledge. [1]-See his book "The Alchemy of Finance"