Nassim Nicholas Taleb seems to gleefully stoke debate. Since he first burst into popular consciousness in 2001 with his best-selling book Fooled by Randomness, Taleb has been a bane of conventional thinking in any field where decisions are necessarily clouded in uncertainty. Economists, journalists, and central bankers are among those he cheerily accuses of serving a dangerous cocktail of pseudoscience and surface plausibility to an unsuspecting public. His latest target is the huge US institutional investor, AQR Capital Management, which manages $143bln from its headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut. Accused by Taleb last month of issuing ‘flawed reports’ to rationalise poor…