Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960-)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese American essayist and scholar whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.

He is a bestselling author, and has been a professor at several universities, currently at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Oxford University. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, a Wall Street trader, and is currently a scientific adviser at Universa Investments and the International Monetary Fund.

He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently making a fortune out of 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 random events, errors, and volatility as well as "stochastic tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means experimentation and fact-collecting instead of top-down directed research.

Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.

— from "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"

An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering.

— from "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal.

— from "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"

You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself.

— from "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"

Incomplete information is functionally equivalent to randomness.

When you have zero intellectual respect for someone, the only compliment he can possibly pay you is an insult.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.