i'm a parent and an active artist during the day. enforcing discipline isn't the only reason to automate - going mechanical frees up enormous amounts of time to do things more interesting than staring at a ticker for 7 hours. you'll have trouble finding performance numbers on Taleb because it's a private fund. his clients/business is such that he has no performance-reporting requirement. it's a fair asusmption that most of the time, he's not doing exceptionally well - but since that's the plan so i suppose in a way he's doing well even when he's not doing well.
Automation does not enforce discipline... It simply transfers responsibilty, hardly what I would refer to as discipline...
of course, you are correct, my statement perhaps leaned too far towards brevity. automation can be a way of helping enforce discipline, but it's neither sufficient nor perfect.
i'm reading that thread for the first time and it has to be one of the best strategy discussion threads i've ever seen on any (public) forum. the best line in the entire discussion was "there is no such thing as a secret strategy".