That said, it is extremely foolhardy to try to paraphrase any of Mr. Taleb’s pronouncements. This is a man who suffers fools impatiently, and his intellect makes his hauteur largely justified. Watch any video clip in which he is being interviewed — or, worse, has to keep quiet while someone else tries and fails to understand whatever he has just said — if you need convincing.

No readers of “The Black Swan,” “Fooled by Randomness” or any of Mr. Taleb’s academic writings about economics, probability, risk, fragility, philosophy of statistics, applied epistemology, etc., will question whether he is qualified to dish out wisdom. And none will be surprised that Mr. Taleb, unlike the inspirational writer he calls “my compatriot from a neighboring (and warring) village in northern Lebanon, Kahlil Gibran, author of ‘The Prophet,’ ” can be blistering. His observations concern superiority, wealth, suckerdom, academia, modernity, technology and the all-purpose, ignorant “they” who dare to doubt him.

Even his book’s title, “The Bed of Procrustes,” is intentionally harsh. As he reminds readers in a brief introduction, the Procrustes of Greek mythology was the cruel and ill-advised fool who stretched or shortened people to make them fit his inflexible bed. Mr. Taleb’s new book addresses the latter-day ways in which “we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.”