effecT: LOL
I'm not even sure the guy's right, really. Right out of grad school I was briefly an assistant to a retired film producer (I seriously think he kept renting his office so he could go in every day and play cards with his office-mate, a retired Broadway producer; my job was to throw out all the stuff he'd hoarded, then sit around and read Variety), and it enraged him any time someone mentioned the William Goldman quote "nobody knows anything." His take was that, despite the great degree of uncertainty in Weirdowood, people could generally make reasonable educated guesses. I feel the same way about Taleb -- sure, most pundits and analysts failed to predict things like 9/11 or the crashes in 1987, 2000, or 2008. But pundits are almost always wrong about everything. Their job isn't to be right, it's to tell people (usually powerful people) what they want to hear. Plenty of others (usually non-influential types) sounded the alarm about almost everything he uses as examples.