That's a classic motte-and-bailey doctrine right there.

It shows Taleb commenting on a topic he clearly knows nothing about while presenting himself as an expert. Something, if I recall correctly, he often criticises in other people. And it's not merely being imprecise, it's at least halfway between being wrong and not even wrong. If someone's that sloppy on Twitter, why would their research be any better?

It probably isn't. In a series of tweets posted around the same time, Taleb also pointed to a "technical" paper claiming a connection between P versus NP and the effects of GMOs [1]. It's drivel. A series of non-sequiturs. No connection is actually established, only claimed. I credit that paper only with relieving me of the dilemma of whether Taleb is an interesting thinker or just another crackpot. (And I'm not even a GMO enthusiast.)

The tweets are now gone; I only found this archive.is link because it was posted to a mathematics cranks subreddit. Probably because these were too obvious of an embarrassment to him. Fine. Though I think Taleb also likes to talk about "courage" a lot...

Taleb's other "technical" papers are not particularly impressive either. I find them completely inscrutable; Taleb never explains his notation or terminology, and I often have a hard time deciphering equations he writes. While this may be because of my rather modest background in statistics, I'm sure it could be possible to make them more accessible. Take Laszlo Babai's paper on graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time [2]: all you have to know in advance to understand it is some basic vocabulary of graph theory and algebra, and you can readily find them even on Wikipedia. He lays out definitions clearly and even goes as far as as presenting Latin equivalents of Fraktur letters (I wouldn't bother). Taleb seems more interested in establishing profundity by obscurity (what Charles Seife calls "proofiness"), like some kind of post-modernist philosopher. Come to think of it, Taleb seems very much like one.

(I know I'm being trolled, but...)

[1] http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PPAlgo2.pdf

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03547v1

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