An observation about Nassim Taleb’s Incerto books: Taleb is highly critical and sarcastic in his Incerto books about a lot of “experts” in fields like economics and statistics and risk management and the social sciences and the media. Some readers are put off by his apparent arrogance. I eventually realized he isn’t annoyed at these practitioners because of their errors; he is annoyed at them because of their hubris, because in their arrogance they are so sure they are right.
And more than that, as he makes plain in the last book in the Incerto series, Skin in the Game, he is particularly outraged at how many of these “experts” are personally insulated from any consequences of their errors. Think, for example, about the Goldman Sachs traders and bankers whose ignorance of risks (or greed) helped set off the 2008 crash, but 953 of them got more than $1 million apiece in bonuses in 2009 from taxpayer bailout money. Or think about the Washington foreign policy experts who set off the Middle East wars, with their millions of casualties and displaced persons, and not only suffered no personal consequences from their errors, but may have even been promoted. In Taleb’s view, it is immoral/unethical to offer “expert” advice to others if one has no exposure to the consequences that may flow from that advice. And I agree with him on this.
In fact Taleb makes clear in a number of places in his books that he is as susceptible to the errors he describes as anyone else, and has to be constantly on guard against them
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