Although he's properly attacking the right beasts, some thing about his epistemology leaves me unconvinced:

- Take for example what he says about the "inverse problem":

"Given a set of observations, plenty of statistical distributions can correspond to the exact same realizations--each would extrapolate differently outside the set of events on which it was derived."

True obviously, but it does seem that he subscribes to the idea that theory building (and a model that isn't grounded on theory is numerology IMHO) is basically fitting curves to data points. Now my prior life as a physicist makes me very hostile to this idea. There is a very lively interplay between theory, model building and producing, reading and interpreting  data. In fact I'm not entirely sure that there exist quantitative data that one can make much sense of without (some sort of) a theory.

This attitude is evident in his opening paragraph. Surely a statistician's hubris is behind the claim that:

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge

...unless one defines knowledge's "core" in a trivial way. In fact this sentence makes sense only in the light of a conviction that "the empirical method" = "data fitting". This is a fallacy recently expounded in Wired magazine and discussed (quite disapprovingly) in the Edge, and in various physics blogs (i.e. backreaction, cosmic variance.)

Now I would argue that a lot of what Taleb is criticizing is part of this "dataset as theory" mentality, permeating a whole branch of financial analysis. But no one sane, expects this method to predict anything but the routine. Taleb is obviously right that you can't extrapolate from the routine to the extreme like this, but if you define extreme as "very infrequent", astronomers can predict the sun turning into a Red Giant a billion years from now; volcanologists can read the signs that a  volcano is preparing for an explosion sometimes months in advance; meteorologists can spot a hurricane forming even as it is still some disorganized low near Cape Verde. Ditto for markets, some have a more accurate view than others about dangerous policies: meltdowns and crashes (as opposed to cycles possibly) might or might not be intrinsic to capitalism, but it sure as hell seems evident that certain policies make them far more likely than others. So statistical inferences and extreme event distributions aside: the odds of a hurricane in the Gulf Coast in January are vastly smaller than those  of a hurricane in August. The odds that all the molecules in the air around me will spontaneously and catastrophically move themselves to the kitchen next door are practically zero. The probability that an economy built on toxic credit will be going "boom" if left unregulated is pretty much 1. I say this because his Dark Swan territory seems to be indifferent to the types of macroeconomic policies pursued. Are crashes equally (un)likely regardless of policy?

- No dataset is an island. Only a turkey could possibly believe that being fed means that "the human race cares about its welfare". A human has datasets of turkeys past who were fed only to be slaughtered. In fact knowledge of the world beyond the particular turkey would make such a claim improbable. Now I understand that the example is for illustration purposes, but there is a similarity with stock markets: crashing after an extravaganza of free and unregulated markets is not exactly a once in a millenium effect, and catastrophic anthropogenic global warming via feedback mechanisms is unprecedented in the history of this planet, but apparently not at all impossible if you're guided by events and data beyond the average global temperature timeseries.  Even though you can't place ballpark probability values on particular catastrophic outcomes, the information about the particular catastrophe (say a "sudden" increase in CO2(eq) in the atmosphere), is not guided by a single dataset but by a host of data, theories and speculations.

I should read the book though, it is quite possible that I'm missing something or misinterpreting...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake