That would be a mistake. He's getting a lot of hate because he's insulted a lot of people while stretching some of his arguments and opinions too far, but his

That would be a mistake. He's getting a lot of hate because he's insulted a lot of people while stretching some of his arguments and opinions too far, but his ideas are still better intellectual reading than most of what's available elsewhere. If you care to read the comments again, you'll notice many of the disagreements with him are on the level of knee-jerk emotional reactions and not well reasoned criticism. However, it's true that he's turned/turning into some gigantic obnoxious ego whose ideas are beginning to look like wild gambles (speaking more often than he substantiates.) He's definitely intelligent and I would say a genius, but in each book it's like: 10% great ideas, 30% very interesting intuitions, 30% vitriolic anger at people/institutions/ideas, 30% broken ideas/intuitions. But all is sold as the truth (tm). If you wish to increase the quality of what you read you could use Taleb's own heuristic: when a book has existed for a thousand years it will exist for a thousand more. Time is a great arbiter for importance. My point is that you either hazard a guess on which of his ideas are powerful, or you wait until the dust settles and somebody else has done this work for you.