Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Wikiquote

Shared by JohnH

Wikiquotes has a large page of NNT quotes.

  • My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts 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.
    • Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page
  • It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.
    • Quoted in the introduction to “A Talk with Nassim Nicholas Taleb,” Edge (April 2004) [1]
  • Much of the research into humans’ risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
  • We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
    • “Learning to Expect the Unexpected,” The New York Times (200404-08}

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Shared by JohnH

From Wikipedia

Taleb in his student days.

Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon. His political Greek Orthodox Levantine family saw its prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War which began in 1975. He is a son of Dr. Najib Taleb, an oncologist and researcher in anthropology, and his wife Minerva Ghosn. Both sides of his family were politically prominent in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox community. On his mother’s side, his grandfather Fouad Nicolas Ghosn and his great-grandfather Nicolas Ghosn were both deputy prime ministers of Lebanon. His paternal grandfather was a supreme court judge; his great-great-great-great grandfather Ibrahim Taleb was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous Mount Lebanon Governorate in 1861. The Taleb family Palazo, built in 1860 by Florentine architects for his great-great-great-great grandfather, still stands in Amioun.

Taleb received his bachelor and master in science degrees from the University of Paris[15] and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Management Science (thesis on the mathematics of derivatives pricing) from the University of Paris (Dauphine)[16] under the direction of Hélyette Geman.[17]

A polyglot, Taleb has a literary fluency in English, French, and classical Arabic, a conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish, and can read classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew, as well as the Canaanite script.[18][19]

[edit] Finance career

Taleb wrote in Fooled by Randomness that he considers himself less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness and used trading to attain his independence and freedom from authority.[20] As a trader, he was a pioneer of tail risk hedging (now called “Black Swan Protection”)[21] and has held the following positions: managing director and proprietary trader at UBS; worldwide chief proprietary arbitrage derivatives trader for currencies, commodities and non-dollar fixed income at CS First Boston; chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez; 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; and founder of Empirica Capital after which Taleb retired from trading and became a full-time author and scholar in 2004.[22] Taleb is currently Principal/Senior Scientific Adviser at Universa Investments in Santa Monica, California, a tail protection firm owned and managed by former Empirica partner Mark Spitznagel.

Is there a wiki editor here? Is there a way to block a mad & obsessive stalker from vandalizing a bio?

Is there a wiki editor here? Is there a way to block a mad & obsessive stalker from vandalizing a bio?

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Seems NNT is under attack on Wikipedia. He has more to say in the comments on this Facebook post. It’s confusing but it seems that the animosity towards him stems from a GQ article [links to PDF of NNT’s corrected version] that was published in 2009. If you’re interested, you can track all the players/stories here, The Taleb GQ-Emails.
A couple of people have volunteered to keep an eye on NNT’s Wiki page. If you’re a wiki editor, you might want to drop by the above Facebook thread to lend a hand.