Oct 18, 2014: Z-News Mississipi: Taleb on Ebola: If you have to overreact about something, this is the place to overreact
Statistician and risk analysis expert, Nassim Taleb, tells Business Insider:
Statistician and risk analysis expert, Nassim Taleb, tells Business Insider:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II. Taleb is a bestselling author, and has been a professor at several universities, currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering and co-editor in chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, a derivatives 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 profiting from 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 a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that option-like experimentation outperforms directed research.
He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from 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 a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that option-like experimentation outperforms directed research.
