Was born Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 1960 year, in the Lebanese city of Amioun. His family professed Orthodoxy. During the civil war, which began in 1975 year, they were deported. Father of Nassim Nicholas, Dr. Taleb was an oncologist, did anthropological research. Among his ancestors are politicians, representing the interests of the Orthodox community of Lebanon. So his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were deputy prime ministers of Lebanon, paternal grandfather served as Chief Justice, and also in 1861 his great-great-great-great-grandfather served as governor of the semi-autonomous Ottoman province on Mount Lebanon. Taleb has held senior positions in brokerage firms in London and New York, and also worked on the stock exchange, before starting his own hedge fund company Empirica LLC (futures and options sales). He received his Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) At Wharton School and defended his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Paris. Author of "Dynamic Hedging" and "Fooled by Randomness".
Taleb knows about ten languages. Fluent in English, French and Literary Arabic, speaks Italian and Spanish, reads in ancient greek, Latin and Aramaic and Canaanite. He owns the idea of creating the Silvercrest-Longchamp NonGaussian Fund. Holds positions:
-Executive Director and Chief Trader at Union Bank of Switzerland. Chief Trader (derivatives) в CS-First Boston, Indosuez Bank
-Executive Director of CIBC-Wood Gundy
-arbitrage trader at BNP-Paribas
-an independent market maker at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
-member of the editorial board and scientific committee: U.S. Secretary of Defense’s Cross-Disciplinary Highland Panel, CISDM Center U. Mass Amherst, Journal of Alternative Investments, Warsaw Institute of Psychology, University of Paris-Dauphine DESS 203
-member of the board of directors: Silvercrest-Longchamp NonGaussian Fund, BVI , Centaurus Capital LP Alpha Fund, Centaurus Kappa Fund
Taleb is known for his skeptical and anti-mathematical approach to risk and uncertainty., distrust of models and statistics, as well as an open dislike for academic financiers.
Taleb considers himself not a trader, and an epistomologist. For him, stock speculation is a way to achieve independence and freedom.. This is described in his book "Fooled by chance", which became a bestseller on Wall Street and translated into 17 languages.
Calling yourself a "skeptical empiricist", he thinks, that scientists, economists, historians, Policy, businessmen and financiers overestimate the possibilities of rational interpretations of statistics and underestimate the impact of unexplained randomness in these statistics. In this way, Taleb continues a long tradition of skepticism, professed by Sextus Empiricus, Al-Ghazali, Pierre Boyle, Montaigne and David Hume, Those who counted, that the past does not allow predicting the future. Taleb is a follower of Karl Popper and claims, that theories cannot be considered proven and can only be used conditionally.
Currently, Taleb is engaged in research in the field of philosophy of chance and the role of uncertainty in society and science with a bias in the philosophy of history and the study of the role of important chances. (he calls them "black swans") in determining the course of history. It is important to note, that black swans are not necessarily negative events or disasters, but also random luck. In his opinion, people do not notice these events, considering the world to be systematized, clear and common structure.
Taleb calls this phenomenon "Platonic delusion" and believes, that it generates three distortions:
– Fabulous delusion: after the fact, the event is described as follows, which does not seem unreasonable
– Misleading the player: assimilation of the system of randomness of the game to random accidents in life. Taleb considers this a mistake of the modern approach to the theory of probability.
– The fallacy of reverse statistics: confidence, that future events are predictable through the study of past events.
Randomness is a reflection of mostly external, irrelevant, unstable, single links of reality; expression of the starting point of cognition of an object; the result of the intersection of independent causal processes, events; form of manifestation of necessity and addition to it.
Game delusion (English. Ludic fallacy) — term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book 2007 "Black Swan". “Ludic” from Latin ludus, what does "game" mean. In a nutshell it is defined, as “abuse of games to simulate real-life situations”. Taleb characterizes delusion as the concept of a card (models) for reality, showing the side effects of human cognition.
The principle is one of the main arguments in the book and a refutation of predictive mathematical models., used to predict the future, - as well as an attack on the ideas of applying a naive and simplified statistical model in complex areas. By Taleb, statistics only work in some areas, such as casinos, in which the odds are visible and determined.
IN 2006 year in the Black Swan, Taleb wrote: “Globalization has created interconnected fragility, reducing volatility and creating the appearance of stability. In other words, she creates the Black Swans. We've never lived under the threat of global collapse before. Financial institutions are merging into fewer and fewer very large banks. All banks are interconnected. The financial biosphere is being eaten by the giants, incestuous, bureaucratic banks, and when one of them falls, all will fall. The increasing concentration of capital in the banking environment seems to make financial crises less likely, but when they do happen, they become more global and hit us harder. We have moved from a diversified “biosphere” of small banks with diversified lending policies, towards a more homogeneous environment of firms, where one resembles the other. Really, we now have fewer cases of bankruptcy, but when they happen ... I'm afraid to even think about it ".
Taleb's predictions turned out to be justified. Reportedly, he made several million dollars during the financial crisis in 2007-2008, which he explains using statistical methods in finance. According to Bloomberg, his Black Swan earned investors half a billion dollars. Taleb's financial success, coupled with previous forecasts, helped fuel his popularity and promotion..
In an article in The Times, Brian Appleyard (Bryan Appleyard) named Taleb the most outstanding thinker in the world at the moment. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman was invited to include the name of Taleb in the list of the best representatives of the intelligentsia, citing “Taleb has changed the way many people think about uncertainty, especially in financial markets. His book, "Black Swan", is an interesting and bold analysis of the, how people try to comprehend unexpected events ”.
