Taleb's book is the "user-friendly" summary of Mandelbrot's work. I almost guarantee you haven't read his book "The (Mis)behavior of Markets," but I highly doubt that you would have gone through such effort to bash Mandelbrot as you have Taleb.

He does not necessarily argue that statistics are backward-looking, but that the world does not follow a Normal Bell Curve. And sure a model is a less complex representation, but it IS fraudulent if the model claims to actually represent what it does not--in this case risk. (The models claim to capture risk but they are based on the normal curve instead of one with fatter tails). I mean, I could tell you that once a month every human goes through the menstrual cycle based on the model of female anatomy... I mean men and women are close enough right?

The bottom line is that the world is not "Normal." In a "Black Swan" world such as ours, statistical series do have memories, large deviations that would almost never occur in billions of years (according to the bell curve) happen all of the time, and Mandelbrot and Taleb both want to point that out and possibly provide an alternative.

The problem is that with a Black Swan world, there is no simple solution like standard deviation to characterize risk (unless its discovery is a black swan in itself) and that is why you cry "HERESY" and call Taleb a charlatan and a fraud.

As for Taleb's book, I found it quite repetitive and plagued with anecdotes, but the information he presents is interesting and valid, especially about the way people think and process information. Your review barely discusses this, despite that he spends a significant portion of the book discussing epistemilogical problems. I'd like to see you find a problem with that section of his book, if you've actually read it. I'm not quite sure I believe that you have.