Taleb is right, Pinker is wrong, but Taleb makes his arguments to general principles rather than operational explanations.
This is why we must have empiricism AND operationalism in scientific assertions.
This is why people like Taleb must work top down (empirically) and others like me must work bottom up (operationally). And why opportunities to do both, like Darwin’s, are the product of novel data collection at much larger (logarithmic?) scale.
I suspect that because of our status differences Taleb and I could not work together on this, and no one will see our different missions as the same as that of Hayek (long run law) and Mises (medium run finance), or that Taleb and I are working on the same problem that Poincaré, Mises, Hayek, Popper, Brouwer, and Bridgman failed to solve: how to we separate science from pseudoscience, once we are talking about stochastic systems at very great scale? What happened when teh industrial revolution hit, and we needed to move from operational accounting to correlative statistics, yet could not bridge the technological gap of testing our statistical statements like we do our theoretical statements. Especially when there is profound incentive to use financialization to accumulate risk and spend down capital precisely because at such scale operations are imperceptible to us.
We boil the frog.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine