I might have been picking one part of Taleb's argument out, or misquoting it, namely that of survivability bias (at least according to the Wikipedia entry). His argument was that the number of market beating investors is what you'd expect by chance if you analysed the statistics, given the number of professionals in the game.
Hence my reading of his argument that they've been lucky rather than skilled.
The misperception of risk strikes me as the sort of thing that a philosopher such as Taleb would be interested in. In fact, he was involved in a fund for a while predicated on the odds of a Black Swan event being more likely than the market predicted. But because he didn't know what the event would be, it would buy up all sorts of cheap options, with the view that it'd generally lose money, but during a crisis (e.g. the GFC) it would pay out big.
Hence my reading of his argument that they've been lucky rather than skilled.
The misperception of risk strikes me as the sort of thing that a philosopher such as Taleb would be interested in. In fact, he was involved in a fund for a while predicated on the odds of a Black Swan event being more likely than the market predicted. But because he didn't know what the event would be, it would buy up all sorts of cheap options, with the view that it'd generally lose money, but during a crisis (e.g. the GFC) it would pay out big.