[zenogais]

To be fair, many many authors have posted books of their own aphorisms while still alive. For exmaple Nietzsche, Cioran, de La Rochefoucauld, et al.

See this wikipedia page for a list of all such authors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphorism

[justin66]

Nietzsche's aphoristic style was actually pretty effective. Taleb has this tendency to throw aphorisms out there and wait for his followers to get confused by them, at which point he revises them (or just explains them). It's hard to imagine most authors operating that way.