Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
---|---|
American | |
Alma mater |
|
Known for | Applied epistemology, antifragility, black swan theory, ludic fallacy, antilibrary |
Awards | Bruno Leoni Award, Wolfram Innovator Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Decision theory, risk, probability |
Institutions | New York University Tandon School of Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences |
Thesis | The Microstructure of Dynamic Hedging (1998) |
Doctoral advisor | Hélyette Geman |
Website | fooledbyrandomness |
Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 (notably, The Black Swan and
Taleb criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about
Early life and family background
Taleb was born in
Education
Taleb received his bachelor and Master of Science degrees from the
According to a profile in Le Monde, Taleb claims to read in ten languages.[29]
Finance view
Taleb has been a practitioner of mathematical finance,[30] a hedge fund manager,[12][31][32] and a derivatives trader.[22][33][34] He is a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.
Taleb considers himself less a businessman than an
He has also held the following positions:
Taleb reportedly became
Taleb attended 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".[44][45]
Academic career
Taleb changed careers and became a mathematical researcher and philosophical essayist in 2006,
Taleb is co-Editor in Chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis (since September 2014),[49] jointly teaches regular courses with Paul Wilmott in London (19th time, March 2015),[50] and occasionally participates in teaching courses toward the Certificate in Quantitative Finance.[51] He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.[52]
Writing career
Taleb's five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, titled 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.[53]
His second non-technical book,
In a 2008 article in The Times, the journalist Bryan Appleyard described Taleb as "now the hottest thinker in the world".[33] 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."[57]
A book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, was released in December 2010.
The fourth book of his Incerto series—Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder—was published in November 2012.[58]
The fifth book of his Incerto series—Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life—was published in February 2018.
Taleb's non-technical writing style has been described as mixing a narrative, often semi-autobiographical style with short philosophical tales and historical and scientific commentary. The sales of Taleb's first two books garnered an advance of $4 million, for a follow-up book on anti-fragility.[22]
Ideas and theories
Taleb's book
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.[59][60] 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,[61][62]: 182 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.[58]: 181ff, 213ff, 236ff
Taleb has called for cancellation of the
In his writings, Taleb has identified and discussed the error of comparing real-world randomness with the "structured randomness" in
In the second edition of The Black Swan, he posited that the foundations of
Taleb has described his main challenge as mapping his ideas of "robustification" and "antifragility", that is, how to live and act in a world we do not understand and build robustness to black swan events. Taleb introduced the idea of the "fourth quadrant" in the exposure domain.[73] One of its applications is in his definition of the most effective (that is, least fragile) risk management approach: what he calls the "barbell strategy" which is based on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes, across all domains from politics to economics to one's personal life. These are deemed by Taleb to be more robust to estimation errors. For instance, he suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless, because risk is difficult, if not impossible to compute. His preferred strategy is to be both hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive at the same time. For example, an investor might put 80 to 90% of their money in extremely safe instruments, such as treasury bills, with the remainder going into highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets with a limited downside.
Taleb asserts that by adopting these strategies a portfolio can be "robust", that is, gain a positive exposure to black swan events while limiting losses suffered by such random events.[74]: 207 Together with Donald Geman and Hélyette Geman, he modeled the "maximum entropy barbell" which consists in "to constrain only what can be constrained (in a robust manner) and to maximize entropy elsewhere", based on an insight by E. T. Jaynes that economic life increases in entropy under regulatory and other constraints.[75] Taleb also applies a similar barbell-style approach to health and exercise. Instead of doing steady and moderate exercise daily, he suggests that it is better to do a low-effort exercise such as walking slowly most of the time, while occasionally expending extreme effort. He claims that the human body evolved to live in a random environment, with various unexpected but intense efforts and much rest.[76]
He appeared as a special guest on
Taleb wrote in Antifragile and in scientific papers[83] that if the statistical structure of habits in modern society differ too greatly from the ancestral environment of humanity, the analysis of consumption should focus less on composition and more on frequency. In other words, studies that ignore the random nature of supply of nutrients are invalid.
Taleb co-authored a paper with Yaneer Bar-Yam and Joseph Norman called Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens – Coronavirus: A note. The paper published on 26 January 2020, took the position that the SARS-CoV-2 was not being taken seriously enough by policy makers and medical professionals.[84][85]
Criticism and reactions
Taleb contends that statisticians can be
Taleb and Nobel laureate
In an interview on Charlie Rose, Taleb said that he saw that none of the criticism he received for The Black Swan refuted his central point, which convinced him to protect his assets and those of his clients.[95]
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.[96]
Honors
- 2009: Included on the Forbes magazine list of "Most Influential Management Gurus"[97]
- 2011: Included on the Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance[98]
- 2013, 2014, 2015: Included among most influential 100 thought leaders in the world by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute[99]
- 2016: Taleb received an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut.[100]
- 2018: Wolfram Innovator Award for contributions to decision making under complicated and less-idealized probabilistic structures using Mathematica.
Major works
Books
Incerto
Incerto is a group of works by Taleb as philosophical essays on uncertainty. It was bundled into a group of four works in November 2016
- ISBN 1-58799-190-X.
- ISBN 978-0812973815.
- ISBN 978-0812982404.
- ISBN 978-1-4000-6782-4.
- ISBN 978-0-4252-8462-9. (This book was not published with the original bundling of the Incerto series.)
Technical Incerto
- Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications (Technical Incerto Vol. 1). STEM Academic Press. 2020. ISBN 978-1-5445-0805-4.
Other
- Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options. New York: ISBN 978-0-471-15280-4.
- Taleb, Nassim Nicholas; ISBN 978-0-1419-8836-8.
Selection of papers
- Taleb, N. N., & West, J. (2023). Working with convex responses: Antifragility from finance to oncology. Entropy, 25(2), 343.
- Cirillo, P.; Taleb, N. N. (2020). "Tail risk of contagious diseases". Nature Physics. 16 (6): 606–613. S2CID 215828381.
- Taleb, N.N.; Norman, J.; Bar-Yam, Y; (26 January 2020) "Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens – Coronavirus: A Note". Academia.edu. Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens – Coronavirus: A Note
- Taleb, N. N. (2019). Medicine and Risk Transfer. Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, (53), 31-32.
- Taleb, N. N.; S2CID 219716527.
- Taleb, N. N. (2015). "Unique Option Pricing Measure with neither Dynamic Hedging nor Complete Markets". European Financial Management. 21 (2): 228–235. S2CID 153841924.
- S2CID 2273464.
- Taleb, N. N.; S2CID 23527680.
- Cirillo, P.; Taleb, N. N. (2016). "On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation". S2CID 9716627.
- Taleb, N. N. (2018). "Election predictions as martingales: an arbitrage approach". Quantitative Finance. 452 (1): 1–5. S2CID 158466482.
- Taleb, N. N. (2018). "How much data do you need? An operational, pre-asymptotic metric for fat-tailedness". International Journal of Forecasting. 35 (2): 677–686. S2CID 139102471.
See also
- Applications of randomness
- List of American philosophers
- Taleb distribution
- Dragon King Theory
Notes
- Arabic: نسيم نقولا طالب
References
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Nassim Taleb a former hedge fund manager commenting on the performance of accounts run by Universa Investments where he is an adviser ...
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Taleb, a hedge fund manager, warns of trying to predict behavior by analyzing past successes.
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- S2CID 2273464.
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- . Retrieved 7 May 2015.
- p values" you find in studies have no meaning with economic and financial variables. Even the more sophisticated techniques of stochastic calculusused in mathematical finance do not work in economics except in selected pockets.
- S2CID 122874205.
- ^ Gangahar, Anuj (16 April 2008). "Mispriced risk tests market faith in a prized formula". Financial Times.
- Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
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When my book came out, I started listening to the criticism, and I realized that nobody attacked my central point. I thought that someone would come up with some convincing argument. Two, three months after the publication, I went for the jugular. I said, this thing is going to go. And, in fact – so.
- ^ "Overheard". The Wall Street Journal. 14 February 2009.
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- ^ "GDI – Think Tank". Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
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External links
- Nassim Taleb's home page
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb at IMDb
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb publications indexed by Google Scholar
- Appearances on C-SPAN