Reddit's Take On Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Boastful, Brilliant Or Both?

The unpredictability of the Brexit vote has led to some spirited financial debates on social media in the past week. One Reddit discussion focused on Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In addition to being a best-selling author, the Lebanese-American statistician is also a former derivatives trader and hedge fund manager.

After reading Taleb’s book “Antifragile,” which focuses on uncertainty, probability, human error and risk, a Reddit poster asked others for opinions of Taleb and his viewpoints on investing.

Despite his commercial success, many posters were not impressed by Taleb’s ideas or his boastful tone.

The top voted comment describes Taleb as “a very frustrated pseudo-academic who is very good at making the obvious (hedge, barbell) sound difficult and important.”

Related Link: Were You 'Positioned' For Brexit?

Another poster said that Taleb’s book “Black Swan” was full of “’no shit’ concepts which anyone applying some basic critical thinking [can] understand.”

One poster said that Taleb’s “narcissism was so thick I had to put his book down.” The post sparked a thoughtful discussion about how many of the smartest people in the world are also very humble. The consensus was that Taleb has some useful and helpful insight into financial markets, but that his self-aggrandizing writing style often clouds his message.

Another pointed out that Taleb at least seems to be self-aware. In “Black Swan,” he shares that his mother once told him she could get rich by simply buying him for his actual value and then selling him back at what he perceived his value to be.