Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb co-authored a paper with Yaneer Bar-Yam and John Norman called Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens – Coronavirus: A note. The paper published on January 26, 2020 took the position that the SARS-CoV-2 was not being taken seriously enough by policy makers and medical professionals.

He appeared as a special guest on The Ron Paul Liberty Report on May 19, 2017 and stated his support for a non-interventionist foreign policy. Taleb subsequently appeared with Ron Paul and Ralph Nader on their respective shows in support of Skin in the Game, which was dedicated to both men.

Taleb received an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut in 2016 and gave a commencement address to the graduating class in which, describing his life, he stated:

Incerto is a group of works by Taleb about managing risk and uncertainty. It was bundled into a group of four works in November 2016 ISBN 978-0399590450. A fifth book, Skin in the Game, was published in February 2018. This fifth book is bundled with the other four works in July 2019 as Incerto (Deluxe Edition) ISBN 978-1984819819.

In late 2015 Nassim, along with Robert J. Frey and Raphael Douady, formed the Real World Risk Institute "to build the principles and methodology for what we call real-world rigor, in decision making and codify a clear-cut way to approach ... to provide executive education courses and issue two certificates."

He is co-Editor in Chief of the academic journal, Risk and Decision Analysis (since September 2014), jointly teaches regular courses with Paul Wilmott in London (19th time, March 2015), and occasionally participates in teaching courses toward the Certificate in Quantitative Finance. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

The fourth book of his Incerto series—Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder—was published in November 2012.

The fifth book of his Incerto series—Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life—was published in February 2018.

He has also proposed that biological, economic, and other systems exhibit an ability to benefit and grow from volatility—including particular types of random errors and events—a characteristic of these systems that he terms antifragility. Relatedly, he also believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. He argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering" rather than by top-down directed research, and has proposed option-like experimentation as a way to outperform directed research as a method of scientific discovery, an approach he terms convex tinkering.

Taleb's aggressive and clearly directed commentary against parts of the finance industry—e.g., stating at Davos in 2009 that he was "happy" that Lehman Brothers collapsed—has led to reports of personal attacks and possible threats.

Taleb and Nobel laureate Myron Scholes have traded personal attacks, particularly after Taleb's paper with Espen Haug on why nobody used the Black–Scholes–Merton formula. Taleb said that Scholes was responsible for the financial crises of 2008, and suggested that "this guy should be in a retirement home doing Sudoku. His funds have blown up twice. He shouldn't be allowed in Washington to lecture anyone on risk." Scholes retorted that Taleb simply "popularises ideas and is making money selling books". Scholes claimed that Taleb does not cite previous literature, and for this reason Taleb is not taken seriously in academia. Haug and Taleb (2011) listed hundreds of research documents showing the Black–Scholes formula was not Scholes' at all, and argued that the economics establishment ignored literature by practitioners and mathematicians (such as Ed Thorp), who had developed a more sophisticated version of the formula.

A book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, was released in December 2010.

In the second edition of The Black Swan, he posited that the foundations of quantitative economics are faulty and highly self-referential. He states that statistics is fundamentally incomplete as a field, as it cannot predict the risk of rare events, a problem that is acute in proportion to the rarity of these events. With the mathematician Raphael Douady, he called the problem statistical undecidability (Douady and Taleb, 2010).

In a May 2009 article, a journalist Will Self published that Taleb said his hedge fund "made $20 bln for our clients." [5]. On June 30, 2009, Reuters published emails that show that Taleb explicitly corrected the journalist. [6]

In a 2008 article in The Times, the journalist Bryan Appleyard described Taleb as "now the hottest thinker in the world". The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman proposed the inclusion of Taleb's name among the world's top intellectuals, saying "Taleb has changed the way many people think about uncertainty, particularly in the financial markets. His book, The Black Swan, is an original and audacious analysis of the ways in which humans try to make sense of unexpected events." Taleb was treated as a "rock star" at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in 2009; at that event he had harsh words for bankers, suggesting that bankers' recklessness will not be repeated "if you have punishment".

His second non-technical book, The Black Swan, about unpredictable events, was published in 2007, selling close to 3 million copies (as of February 2011). It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, 17 as hardcover and 19 weeks as paperback, and was translated into 31 languages. The book has been credited with predicting the banking and economic crisis of 2008.

Taleb contends that statisticians can be pseudoscientists when it comes to risks of rare events and risks of blowups, and mask their incompetence with complicated equations. This stance has attracted criticism: the American Statistical Association devoted the August 2007 issue of The American Statistician to The Black Swan. The magazine offered a mixture of praise and criticism for Taleb's main points, with a focus on Taleb's writing style and his representation of the statistical literature. Robert Lund, a mathematics professor at Clemson University, writes that in Black Swan, Taleb is "reckless at times and subject to grandiose overstatements; the professional statistician will find the book ubiquitously naive." However, Lund acknowledges that "there are many points where I agree with Taleb," and writes that "the book is a must" for anyone "remotely interested in finance and/or philosophical probability."

Aaron Brown, an author, quantitative analyst, and finance professor at Yeshiva and Fordham Universities, said that "the book reads as if Taleb has never heard of nonparametric methods, data analysis, visualization tools or robust estimation." Nonetheless, he calls the book "essential reading" and urges statisticians to overlook the insults to get the "important philosophic and mathematical truths." Taleb replied in the second edition of The Black Swan that "One of the most common (but useless) comments I hear is that some solutions can come from 'robust statistics.' I wonder how using these techniques can create information where there is none". While praising the book, Westfall and Hilbe in 2007 complained that Taleb's criticism is "often unfounded and sometimes outrageous." Taleb, writes John Kay, "describes writers and professionals as knaves or fools, mostly fools. His writing is full of irrelevances, asides and colloquialisms, reading like the conversation of a raconteur rather than a tightly argued thesis. But it is hugely enjoyable – compelling but easy to dip into. Yet beneath his rage and mockery are serious issues. The risk management models in use today exclude the very events against which they claim to protect the businesses that employ them. These models import a veneer of technical sophistication ... Quantitative analysts have lulled corporate executives and regulators into an illusory sense of security." Berkeley statistician David Freedman said that efforts by statisticians to refute Taleb's stance have been unconvincing.

Taleb changed careers and became a mathematical researcher, scholar and philosophical essayist in 2006, and has held positions at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at University of Massachusetts Amherst, at London Business School, and at Oxford University. He has been Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, since 2008. He was Distinguished Research Scholar at the Said Business School BT Center, University of Oxford (2009-2013).

Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 (of which the most known books are The Black Swan and Antifragile). He has been a professor at several universities, serving as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008. He has been co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader, and is currently listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.

Taleb's five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled the Incerto, covers the following books: Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018). It was originally published in November 2016 including only the first four books. The fifth book was added in August 2019.

His first non-technical book, Fooled by Randomness, about the underestimation of the role of randomness in life, published in 2001, was selected by Fortune as one of the smartest 75 books known.

He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He proposes antifragility in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.

Taleb reportedly became financially independent after the crash of 1987 and was successful during the Nasdaq dive in 2000 as well as the financial crisis that began in 2007, a development which he attributed to the mismatch between reality and statistical distributions used in finance. Following this crisis, Taleb became an activist for what he called a "black swan robust society". Since 2007 he has been a Principal/Senior Scientific Adviser at Universa Investments in Miami, Florida, a fund which is based on the "black swan" idea, owned and managed by former Empirica partner Mark Spitznagel. Some of its separate funds made returns of 65% to 115% in October 2008. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, Taleb claimed he retired from trading in 2004, and became a full-time author. However, he describes the nature of his involvement as "totally passive" from 2010 on.

Taleb received his bachelor and master of science degrees from the University of Paris. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1983), and a PhD in Management Science from the University of Paris (Dauphine) (1998), under the direction of Hélyette Geman. His dissertation focused on the mathematics of derivatives pricing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (/ˈ t ɑː l ə b / ; alternatively Nessim or Nissim; born 1960) is a Lebanese-American (of Antiochian Greek descent) essayist, scholar, mathematical statistician, and former option trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan has been described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.

Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon, to Minerva Ghosn and Nagib Taleb, a physician/oncologist and a researcher in anthropology. His parents were Greek Orthodox Lebanese, holding French citizenship. His grandfather, Fouad Nicolas Ghosn, and his great-grandfather, Nicolas Ghosn, were both deputy prime ministers in the 1940s through the 1970s. His paternal grandfather Nassim Taleb was a supreme court judge and his great-great-great-great grandfather, Ibrahim Taleb (Nabbout), was a governor of Mount Lebanon in 1866. Taleb attended a French school there, the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut. His family saw its political prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975.