The Mathiness of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Hardly.

Having read his books, he's a bright guy often with compelling ideas. If he would leave them as thought experiments and appeals to common sense honestly I think his arguments would be more effective. His need to formalize everything mathematically, for a reader with a moderately sophisticated mathematical background, ends up undermining his argument.

Namely, you claim (necessarily without proof) that a real-world phenomenon is analogous to a certain mathematical model. Then you prove some things about the model. Finally, you claim that the things you've proved about the model are also true about the real world. It doesn't matter how rigorous the mathematical steps in the middle are, the strength of this kind of argument is determined by the first step: how strong is the analogy between the mathematical system and real life?

In physics, we can build models where the analogy is very strong: when we try out new situations in both the model and in real life, we get the same answer in both. In (macro-)economics, we typically do something weaker, where we start with a set of models determined by intuition, and then choose the one that gives results most similar to real life in the situations we've already seen. Prediction of future events is really difficult.

It seems like the approach in Taleb's paper is even weaker. We choose a model based on pure analogy, explicitly disclaim the usefulness of evidence ("While evidentiary approaches are often considered to reflect adherence to the scientific method in its purest form, it is apparent that these approaches do not apply to ruin problems"), and then attack anyone who says that we've done something other than prove a mathematical theorem about the real world.

It's too bad, because underneath all of the "mathiness" is one of the strongest arguments against GMOs that I've heard (and I say that as a GMO-eater). It just should have been an opinion piece in the NYT rather than a research article on the arxiv.