That's sort of Taleb's whole thing: most successful investors just happened to be riding a wave and cannot claim any sort of genius. The Black Swan event is always explained away as some kind of environmental blip and investment success explained as the inevitable outcome of hard work- when in fact it is Black Swans that are inevitable and hard-working investors are just a background constant.
While what you are saying is almost certainly true, I'm actually talking about something else - people who did good work and then stop doing good work in fields where good work = good decisions. It's easy to stop doing the work and keep making the decisions and no one is the wiser for years.
This is a correct and at the same time rather misleading article. Sure, in principle it would be prudent to investigate literally everything every time. And he makes it sounds like not doing so makes a person literally 100% useless and dysfunctional. But he "forgets" to mention that investigation is non-free. And depending on the topic, the amount of such investigations and the length of each one can vary dramatically. Up to the point where whole life and all of the resources could be spent doing it.
Heuristics That Almost Always Work have a helpful hint right there in the name. They do work, and they do it almost every time. And depending on the topic that 99.99% may be even 100%, but we just can't reliably prove it. Stuff that works 99.99% of the time is very valuable and helps humans free resources and time for the less reliable or more severe problems. Or just for leisure. Personally, I invite author to go disprove every single idea on the internet and do it in careful and deep detail, let's see how long he would last without heuristics. :)
