I know what you mean about implications of the science vs the science itself. I've been flailing about in it for around a year or so trying to get my mind around Bayesian statistics, with which Taleb's argument is enwrapped. I learned stats the old fashioned way -- 1 factor anovas and linear regression.

It is people educated like me, a small toolbox with only a hammer, that got us into the mess from the technical side. We didn't know enough to understand the fundamental dangers of market innovations like derivatives and hedge funds and the like. We are all wowed by the Nobel Prize winners and believe a prize is an indicator of infallibility.

Taleb understands the math, understands the underlying concepts and argues that it exposes us to unexpected events. Before all of these wonderful models came along investment bankers and stockbrokers were more conservative (in the financial sense) because they feared the unknown and so, faced the unknown with caution. With all of the modeling and such people self-deluded into supposing that they understood risk and therefore, discounted it. Taleb says we fundamentally do NOT understand risk and worse, the more we delude ourselves, the greater our exposure to disaster.

A lot of the econometric modeling is seeping into ecology. The terminology changes but the math remains much the same. It will be interesting to discover whether we succumb in ecology, to the unexpected because we believe we can control it. Right now most ecologists (scientists, not tree-huggers) are conservative (in the scientific sense!) because ecology is extremely complex and knowledge of dependencies and forcing factors is terribly inadequate. Ecology needs a Newton. But ecologists also need to remember that for every Newton, there's an Einstein. That's what economics needs -- it's Einstein.