"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).
What I do: I am interested in how to live in a world we don’t understand very well –in other words, while most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, I am interested in how to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of “knowledge” into decisions –how not to be a “turkey”. My last book The Black Swan (and the 4th Quadrant papers) drew a map of what we don’t understand; my current work focuses on how to domesticate the unknown "what to do in a world we don't understand".
My activism: a) To "robustify" society against Black Swans --activism against those who fragilize it (bankers, economists etc.) But I am bored with finance and interested in worthier mission,like b) Climate change: -- I am working on the opposite of conventional scientism: a precise protocol of what to do when you don't understand climate change --the Bonham declaration.
Ten Principles for a Black Swan Proof World , With Arianna Huffington (Video) , Mr Taleb Goes to Washington, No tie, bored by empty suits , Kahneman-Taleb: Reflection on a Crisis (Video) , Positive Black Swans
Charlie Rose , Discussion with Mandelbrot , Universa's Activities ; Interviews: Newsweek, TIME ; This keeps track of Press Articles (I stopped following).
QUOTES FROM THE BLACK SWAN THAT THE IMBECILES DID NOT WANT TO HEAR ; Technical Appendix for The Black Swan (academics should comment on data there not make technical comments on a LITERARY book); My Op-Ed on Bystanders and Charlatans ; Most intellectual: Econtalk Podcast
History Written By the Losers, Forward to Pablo Triana's Book Lecturing Birds on Flying
Most representative overall profiles: Will
Self in GQ (with typo on the
"billions") & Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday
Times
.
Notes and Remarks (old-style footnotes for my work in progress, not a blog) , Public Lectures & Talks
"The
Fourth Quadrant", an EDGE (Third Culture) Essay on the Crisis,
Frankfurter
Algemeine ,
Portfolio
Interview , Philosophical discussion on France
Culture (en Francais), Philosophy
Now ...
“You do something quite evil!”
How I pull tricks on reviewers:
BBC
(Nikki Bedi). My central argument here
and here
(FT Op-Ed).
PRESS related to The Black Swan. Discussions of my ideas (selection of “get the point” items from coverage >230 million readers/listeners/viewers so far):
The
Bloomberg
profile (sequel here)
.
Lunch
with the FT, South
China Morning Post, Portfolio
Interview,
Book
Review of The
Black Swan in
the Wall Street Journal (David
Shaywitz who later became a collaborator),
Niall Ferguson (Sunday
Telegraph &
LA
Times ), Roger
Lowenstein in
Portfolio,
The
Economist, Intellectual
Reviewer in the Philadephia
Inquirer, Business
Standard (India) ,Short and Sweet in 
TIME,
the
Financial Times
(John Kay),
The
Guardian (Oliver Burkeman).
More from
The
Guardian. Also
Business
Week,
Bloomberg,
The
Sunday
Times (London),
International
Herald Tribune . Will Self
in
The
Independent Great &
honest bad review ,by a smart but angry reviewer: more from
The
Independent ; even more
from
The
Independent. More
Sunday
Times (the economics editor). More London Times
(Gabriel
Rosenberg). Even more London Times (Science
Editor). Surprisinly more
London
Times (5th
review!) Even More
London Times (6th)!
Even more
(I give up).
ECONOMIC
TIMES (India Times), Sydney
Morning Herald, bad review in
The
Telegraph, Good review in
The
Telegraph . Minneapolis
Star,
,
Barron’s, The
Irish Times
,
Canadian
Fp,
Business
Day (SA),
New
Scientist.
Business
World (India) ,
DNA
(India), Jamaica
Gleaner,
,
even the
.
Harvard
Business Review
,
The
Providence Journal, Management
Today, Almada
(Arabic),
Motley
Fool, More Financial
Times, More Surowiecki in
Wired
and BookForum
(many other treatments like the
one by Malcolm Gladwell in the
New
Yorker, while flattering, put me
in the wrong box
--too much emphasis on the far less
interesting, more limited –and rather boring --applications of my
ideas to finance/economics, & less on the dynamics of historical
events/philosophy of history, artistic success, technological luck,
and general uncertainty in society. Finance
is for philistines!).
(Warm thanks to Dave Lull for tracking
reviews).
Italiano: Corriere della Sera, l’Expresso
BLOGS.
Recent.
Nice Summary
of my ideas. Literary: Storytelling.
Grumpy
Old Bookman. Econophysics.
Knackered
Hack. Antilibrary in Bjorn
Staerk. Joe
Wikert (a publisher). A philosopher.
A
trader’s perspective Venture
Capital
Freakonomics
Q&A. Application of TBS to theology
here
and here.
(Blogs are often —though not always –more authentic than formal
book reviews and less prone to imitation/contagion; you get true
diversity).
MEDIA.
(favorites):
NPR
(lenghty).
today’s
programme. Interview on PBS
Lehrer Newshour
here
[60 sec. clip]. PRI
Radio InterviewRobert
Pollie, public radio.
Colbert
report. Tavis Smiley, CSPAN
with David Brooks,
Charlie
Rose
PodCasts.
My favorite: very long, deep & scholarly: Econtalk.
Shorter:
Guardian.
Philosophy
Talk
PHONIES & FAKE REVIEWERS:
Factual and Logical Mistakes in
the
review
by Gregg
Easterbrook Tyler
Cowen’s review in
Slate.
Phonies and
dishonest academics misrepresenting my ideas .
Black Swan Debates/Critiques (So far, except for a comment by Jon Elster, everything had already been directly answered in the book). Peter Taylor’s lecture exposition of the ludic fallacy.
Literary Books
The
Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:
Amazon
(US), Barnes
and Noble (US).
Amazon.com, The Economist, Business Week, & The Financial Times Best Books 2007. Winner GetAbstract Award 2007. Shortlisted FT-Goldman Sachs Award. The Black Swan was the #1 Highest Selling Nonfiction book published in 2007 on Amazon (for all of 2007) ( & 17 weeks on the NYT Bestseller list, 78 weeks on the NYT extended list, & 15 months on the Business Week list, plus London Sunday Times, Germany, Switzerland, China, Italy, Brazil, etc. —whatever that means; not too glorious, given the other books). Languages so far (31, both books) .
“[...]a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne “ (WSJ), A Masterpiece” Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. “Fearless ... in puncturing phony expertise… Read this book.” –Philip E. Tetlock, University of California, Berkeley, author of Expert Political Judgment. “Had Nassim Taleb been born in any other period, he would have certainly been put to death”, Carine Chichereau, co-translator of TBS. “Brilliantly idiosyncratic” –Niall Ferguson.“...in a provocative, wide-ranging and amusing mode. A book that is both entertaining and difficult.”, Michael Crichton. Black Swan Glossary . Odyssey Marine codenamed their shipwreck discovery “Black Swan” –Company Site.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life, 2nd EditionAmazon(US), Barnes and Noble (US), Amazon (UK). Paperback: Random House, 2005, Penguin (UK) 2007. Hardcover: New York, and London: Thomson Texere, April 2004 (1st Ed. November 2001). Published in 20+ languages. “One of the Smartest Books of all Time” (Fortune).
"This book is about luck perceived and disguised as nonluck (that is, skills), and randomness perceived and disguised as nonrandomness (that is, determinism). It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason." FBR was initially written as short stories around series of fictional characters. An irreverent introspective rumination on the deformations caused by randomness through literature, markets, philosophy, science, and mathematics. It made many readers feel better about their comparative fate.
Languages so far (both books): Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian (Presentazione del Cigno nero in italiano), Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese-Portugal, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish ...
Recent
Essays: EDGE
Essay on the Fourth Quadrant, FT
Op-Ed on the “Nobel” in economics (October 2007). Essay in
The
Banker on The Black Swan
(written before the
subprime crisis). 2007
Year-End Question on Edge –The
Black Swan and Optimism. General:
* Edge
Foundation Yearly Question 2005, in
John Brockman (ed.) . Homo
Ludens or Homo Oeconomicus.
Manifesto with Benoit Mandelbrot in the FT page
1, page
2. The
Opiate of the Middle Class (no
longer religion) Op-Ed
on Terrorism in the New York Times (how
the press distorts our mental probabilistic map) Also Op-Ed
in the New York Times on
the 9/11 Commission.
Op-Ed
on Risk Gurus as Charlatans --
(with Benoît Mandelbrot). Article
on Fractals and Roughness (in
Italian, Il-Sole 24 Ore, with Mandelbrot). Op
Ed in An-Nahar (Arabic).
Letters
to the Editor (on
a variety of subjects).
See
the Edge/Third Culture
Presentation/Video summarizing
my ideas.
Nonliterary Books & Works
Dynamic
Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options , New
York : Wiley (c. 506 pp., released Jan 2 1997). The book is about my
own bottom-up approach to quantitative finance & risk management.
I am aggressively no-nonsense, suspicious of theories (particularly
those concocted by economists). It is the first step in my plan to
help merge option "theory" and practice (which includes
some non trivial modifications), leading to a clinical approach to
stochastic processes. Here is a cartoon
showing Dynamic
Hedging as instrumental in the starting
of a colorful and intense interoffice romance. There is no
scheduled second edition yet.
Once again, history has been kind to the book and the ideas presented in it –its 10th year has been the best. It is mostly used by professional option traders in training programs, risk managers, and, on the occasion, mathematical finance students. Most academics (like this one, & many more) who voiced criticism about my no-nonsense approach to risks of derivatives & disliked my intrusion into the reality of the process (how could a practitioner tell us how things should be done?) have had their works & ideas steadily gliding into the purest of oblivions.
Scientific
Web-Book: Mathematical and Quantitative Lectures and Discussions.
Scholarly Works ( since 2004)
Is Medicine Fooled by Randomness ?
Errors, Robustness, and The Fourth Quadrant , forthcoming, a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting
Financial Engineering: I lost interest in finance (for philistines/phonies) but I am publishing stuff I wrote years ago Why We Never Used the Black-Scholes-Merton Option Formula (forthcoming, Wilmott Technical Paper).
Cognitive Science:* Statistical Intuitions and Domains (with Dan Goldstein).
Mathematical Sciences/Finance:*Statistics and rare events, f. The American Statistician, August 2007, Vol. 61, No. 3 * Scale-Invariance in Practice: Some Questions and Workable Patches (under revision, Complexity –special issue on econophysics, Santa Fe Institute). * Mild vs. Wild Randomness: Focusing on those Risks that Matter (with Benoit Mandelbrot), in The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable in Financial Institutions Frank Diebold, Neil Doherty, and Richard Herring, editors, Princeton: Princeton University Press, *The Illusion of Dynamic Replication (with Emanuel Derman), Quantitative Finance, volume 5, 4,2005,* Random Jump, Not Random Walk (With Benoit Mandelbrot), forthcoming * Mandelbrot Makes Sense Wilmott, February 2005*These Extreme Exceptions of Commodity Derivatives, in Helyette Geman’s Commodity Derivatives (Wiley, 2004) *On Skewness in Investment Choices, Greenwich Roundtable Quarterly, Volume 2, 2004.
Literary Journals: *Roots of Unfairness Literary Research/Recherche Litteraire (Journal of the International Comparative Literature Association) 21.41-42 (2005): 241-254 *The Black Swan and the Arts ARTE-SCIENZA Multidisciplinary Symposium, Roma, September 2004.
Philosophy/Epistemology: “Decision and Probability” Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2009, w. Avital Pilpel). My central idea:*The A Priori Problem of Observed Probabilities,* Risk and Epistemology (with Avital Pilpel) Risk and Regulation (LSE)*I problemi epistemologici del risk management in: Daniele Pace (a cura di) Economia del rischio. Antologia di scritti su rischio e decisione economica, Giuffré, Milano 2005 *On the Very Unfortunate Problem of Not Observing Probability Distributions )(with Avital Pilpel) an* Essay in the Epistemology of Power Laws (Wilmott, 2005), *See the reply by the philosopher of science Elie Ayache. More comments from Ayache.
Political Science/ Military/Security *“On the Risk of the Unforecastable and its Perception”, in Preventing Genocide: A Handbook for Foreign Policy Professionals, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Publications, Spring 2005 *“The Black Swan: Why Don’t We Learn that We Don’t Learn?” , the United States Department of Defense Highlands Forum papers, February 2004 (Insightful comment on the extensions in the Washington Post (click here).
My Friends:Rolf Dobelli, www.dobelli.com. See Spyros Makridakis' book: Dance With Chance.
I will not discuss publicly my business activities (my finance activities are not public). –only my literary and technical ideas on the philosophy of chance uncertainty, & probability.
Book Jacket Bio: NNT is an essayist, belletrist, & researcher only interested in one single topic, chance (particularly extreme & rare events, the “Black Swans” i.e. outliers); but it falls at the intersection of philosophy/epistemology (skepticism; knowledge about the dynamics of history; inferential claims), philosophy/ethics (stoicism facing random events; theories of nonhedonic happiness), mathematical sciences (probability theory, statistical physics), social science/finance (opacity & decision making under incomplete information), and cognitive science (the mental biases making us “fooled” by randomness). A post-trader, he mainly derives his intuitions from a 2-decade long and intense practice of derivatives trading (“nondull” activities with plenty of randomness).
Academic & Teaching: Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, NYU - Polytechnic Institute, Visiting Professor, London Business School, & co-director of the Decision Science Laboratory. Dan Goldstein ( also Wiki) and I are starting the “ecological uncertainty” project running a family of experiments on the intuition of randomness. Was the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Fellow & Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (since 1999), and affiliated faculty, Wharton School Financial Institutions Center. My most enjoyable teaching experience is the 2 –day seminar I co-teach with Paul Wilmott twice a year. Honorary member, Edinburgh Generation Science Club; member, Advisory Board of the Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, etc.
Trading/Finance background: Was inducted in the Derivatives Strategy Derivatives Hall of Fame (Feb 2001). I was mostly a prop trader until 1993, then became more arbitrage oriented. I held positions of managing director and head trader at Union Bank of Switzerland, worldwide chief derivatives trader for currencies, commodities and non-dollar fixed income at CS-First Boston, chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez (age 25), Managing Director and worldwide head of financial option arbitrage at CIBC-Wood Gundy, derivatives arbitrage trader at Bankers Trust, proprietary trader at BNP-Paribas, as well as independent option market maker on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (...). Owned Empirica LLC a trading/hedging/protection operation (currently the business became the Black Swan Protection Protocol managed by the traders at Universa –I am an advisor). Note that EMPIRICA WAS NEVER CLOSED. Current Corporate Boards: a few hedge funds. A prophetic novel by Viken Berberian about Empiricus Kapital. Other honors: Frost and Sullivan Visionary of the Year (2008).
Education: includes an MBA from Wharton, and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris (Paris 9 Dauphine, Management Science). The Ph.D. committee included: Hélyette Geman, Marco Avellaneda, Nicole Elkaroui, Dilip Madan, & Jacques Hamon.
Personal: I am originally from Amioun (Amyoun) (see photos) but, the family has not lived there since 189 outside of vacations; it is in the Greek Orthodox Levantine heartland (we are what Cavafy calls ellenosuron or, what people call less poetically the Antiochans --and I am a native French speaking Ελληνοσύρος (Greek blood, Syrian-Lebanese heart, Arabic tongue) son of Jesuit educated French citizens to confuse matters (though I am not a French citizen).
You are welcome to send me a very brief email at gamma [at] fooledbyrandomness [dotcom]. You would do me a favor if you waited a while as I am not in an online mode and have 1500 neglected letters in my inbox (so please just send mail for pressing matters). Concise messages are much preferable (say a maximum < 40 words) as I will not be able to read long letters. Please do not 1) send me your papers or other “interesting material” to read, 2) ask finance questions (not my specialty, 3) make me to rewrite sections of my books (I write books, not emails), 4) ask for a list of “other interesting books to read”, 5) ask me to provide career or educational advice, 6) send me passages from Tolstoy or the Ecclesiast on luck and randomness, 7) send me the list of typos in my drafts. Note that I almost always reply (but ONLY to short messages), time permitting (but once) –even to nasty emails. Finally, note that, thanks to my new keyboard, I sometimes reply in Arabic, particularly to academics.
[Also please please refrain from offering to “improve” my web site].