Yes, the joke works because people like him are so common...and tiresome.

It is very clear you haven't read The Black Swan or know anything of Taleb's background for you to make such a statement.

The joke's on you.

His quote in a recent New Yorker interview: "The gods don't want us to be too ambitious, too agressive, they just want us to leave the planet the way we got it" is hardly tiresome. If we had thought along those lines from the beginning we wouldn't be in all this trouble now. And our water would taste delicious. Our air would be clean.