He's inflammatory. Really, really inflammatory. He also tends to write about obvious technical points so if you do pick through the morass and find the gem you'

He's inflammatory. Really, really inflammatory. He also tends to write about obvious technical points so if you do pick through the morass and find the gem you'll be a bit underwhelmed. In this instance, standard deviations are obviously important statistics to compute and have many, many useful properties, sure, but Taleb rightly points out that they can be misused and I agree with him that their misuse is endemic in science and a downright travesty outside of it. But to just say that some tool is both useful and misusable is boring and wouldn't cause people to talk about this nearly as much. I don't really like Taleb's style, but I can't deny that it causes conversation about things that people often would not give a second thought. In that way, I can see the outlines of a really great point underlying his inflammatory rhetoric. Don't hate the player? At least he's arguing that people ought to be smarter and worry about what data really means.