Edit: i am genuinely interested. I double majored and one major was poli sci. I also have a job where i forecast based on the past. The book challeneged my previous thinking. His primary critique was of conventional economics/economists but he also brought history/historians into it. Curious to know what others think?
Could you perhaps share some light on his critique on history? I only recall his disagreement with economics..
Could you link to anything? If you're talking about the film, I don't have a copy and haven't seen it, so a scene or summary would help.
As I understood it, Taleb criticized the tendency humans have to fall for the narrative fallacy, as /u/Rebelrockstar already mentioned. I cannot vouch for others but I believe this criticism is worthy of consideration: it is indeed far too easy to find patterns in random data and attribute meaning and causation even when they don't really exist.
My own work (PhD thesis coming out next year, one hopes) actually tries to deconstruct one accepted narrative and show that the simple narrative that has become entrenched over the last 60 years is at least somewhat misleading. The case is about the development of a radically new copper smelting method immediately following the Second World War. An accepted narrative argues that it was developed as a response to post-war energy scarcity, but my research into the "prehistory" of this invention shows that this is very much an oversimplification - and doesn't answer at all the really interesting question: why that technology was developed instead of several alternatives, any one of which could have been, on the face of it, feasible?
Turns out that after the radical innovation succeeded, these other, more cautious alternatives were in effect "airbrushed out" from the discourse, and no one even mentioned that there were alternatives as well.
In conclusion, the narrative where there is simple cause causing a dramatic effect seems to be highly resistant to actual facts; I suspect this has a lot to do with the idea that human thinking seems to be largely based on stories and narratives. So we tend to mould the evidence to fit the tidy narrative.
Another instance that comes to mind from my field (history of technology) is a 2011 PhD thesis from Hermione Giffard. She reviewed the case of German WW2 jet engine development and argued fairly persuasively that on closer examination German jet engines were in fact a continuation of ersatz military hardware development: the superior performance of jet engines was more or less a welcome bonus, while the real (or at least a major) selling point was that they consumed far less critical materials and manpower (and could run on low-grade fuel) while delivering performance at least equal to the best piston engines of the day. Giffard's work is valuable in helping us to understand a lot of otherwise somewhat puzzling design choices the Germans made (e.g., most of the parts were tooled for mass production even at the expense of performance or durability) and for showing - again - that the simple narratives may hide some fairly crucial facts.
Giffard, H. S. (2011). The Development and Production of Turbojet Aero-Engines in Britain, Germany and the United States, 1936-1945. Imperial College, University of London.
To me, Taleb's writings seemed to be deliberately provocative and I'd argue that there are some things about history that we can believe to be "true," for useful values of true. There are also certainly some causes that were more important than others, and some cases where there really can be said to have been a single, simple cause causing equally simple effect. But the warning against the narrative bias is well worth listening to.