Having read both Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, as well as every other noteworthy book closely related to this area, not just as it's applied to finance, I completely disagree with the review of the book and Taleb.

No disrespect to the reference to Martin Gardner, who is basically completely unknown as compared to Taleb in terms of readership, (FBR is required reading in many schools and at many firms worldwide and The Black Swan is already a bestseller), but his model for deciding "cranks" is vastly overstated, and, in fact, would probably be capriciously applied against other brilliant thinkers and innovators, who are not authors or who don't have a history in the financial services world, should it fit the reviewer's agenda. Also, #5 absolutely cracks me up. If people weren't creating neologisms on a regular basis, our language would hardly evolve. There's no flaw in Taleb for offering his own. The populace is who decides whether something becomes integrated.

Yes Taleb refutes the work of others--even others who are heavily credentialed--but at the end of the day he makes good points. People are excellent at analzying data in reverse to fit their theories or to help explain situations, especially the unpredictable. But truly, at the end of the day, we know very little about the highly improbable. Having recently seen him speak in person, he himself said the same for himself, so it's not as if he is claiming any kind of elaborate or advanced knowledge of how to predict Black Swans, which would weaken his point.

Overall, I wonder whether the reviewer has even read the book, or is not instead merely "nexting" what he expects Taleb to say (even if Taleb is writing something totally different), based on the biases of his own experiences.