What separates Taleb from the “enlightened ones” is his aggressive activism that lets him bash the highest authority of any given domain such as presidents, lawmakers, bankers, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, professors, economists and Nobel laureates, proving them wrong face-to-face in mass media.

[G]

He is the living application and proof of his beliefs, and his courage to insult authority, for as long as he has damning evidence, empowers the small fries who have been silenced for so long. For the first time in years it’s exciting to watch the news again. You can easily imagine Taleb suddenly popping out of nowhere, calling bullshit on forecasts and predictions by governments and corporations and other institutions.

[H]

What I loved the most among Taleb’s entertaining narratives was on “How to Spot a Phony”:

If you hear an “expert” bring up Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to explain unpredictability, he is a phony. The quantum indeterminacy of subatomic particles average out in classical objects through the Law of Large Numbers, which isn’t even near the complexity of predicting how a butterfly flapping its wings in New Delhi can create a hurricane in New Orleans, even within a deterministic universe.