When talking about deviation, you're describing the spread of a distribution. It's perfectly fine to describe your data using mean (or median) average deviation

When talking about deviation, you're describing the spread of a distribution. It's perfectly fine to describe your data using mean (or median) average deviation, but then fit a model on top of that minimizes the sum of squared errors. Taleb's point is that squared deviations make for a lousy descriptive statistic as it leads you to underestimate the average distance of observations from the mean.