Talk:Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Self-published sources and original research
Many parts of this article rely, to varying degrees, on self-published sources (e.g. from Taleb's own website) and original research (e.g. exegesis of Taleb's books without reference to a secondary source). Large parts of the Ideas and Theories section, for example, seem to be original research. This is poor practice when dealing with the biography of a living figure, and an author at that. I think this is self-evident, although Limit-theorem seems to disagree. I am open to different views regarding how these shortcomings should be signposted within the article, but I am confident that something needs to be done here. Pubcrawler2000 (talk) 11:28, 2 April 2022 (UTC)


 * There is something I fail to understand about your claims. Many of what you call "self-published" is in fact in newspaper articles and you removed Bloomberg which is the main source of financial news as non reliable. And by your criterion 'all" wiki articles would be OR. Furthermore, as per wiki:

"Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities, without the self-published source requirement (...), so long as: This policy also applies to material published by the subject on social networking websites such as Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook." So really I fail to see any logic to some of your removals. If you have doubt about the authenticity of the claims you can discuss further, but you need to understand that Wiki is an encyclopedia and claims that Bloomberg is self-published are not constructive. Limit-theorem (talk) 13:14, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
 * 1) the material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim;
 * 2) it does not involve claims about third parties;
 * 3) it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the source;
 * 4) there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity; and
 * 5) the article is not based primarily on such sources.

Let me be concrete. This entire continuous part of Ideas and Theories relies upon citing and directly interpreting Taleb's own books:

Taleb calls this the "ludic fallacy". His argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on Plato's Theory of Forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account, such as: the impossibility of possessing all relevant information, that small unknown variations in the data can have a huge impact, and flawed theories/models that are based on empirical data and that fail to consider events that have not taken place, but could have taken place. Discussing the ludic fallacy in The Black Swan, he writes, "The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly, in both computational and mental effort."

In the second edition of The Black Swan, he posited that the foundations of quantitative economics are faulty and highly self-referential. He states that statistics is fundamentally incomplete as a field, as it cannot predict the risk of rare events, a problem that is acute in proportion to the rarity of these events. With the mathematician Raphael Douady, he called the problem statistical undecidability (Douady and Taleb, 2010).

Taleb has described his main challenge as mapping his ideas of "robustification" and "antifragility", that is, how to live and act in a world we do not understand and build robustness to black swan events. Taleb introduced the idea of the "fourth quadrant" in the exposure domain. One of its applications is in his definition of the most effective (that is, least fragile) risk management approach: what he calls the "barbell strategy" which is based on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes, across all domains from politics to economics to one's personal life. These are deemed by Taleb to be more robust to estimation errors. For instance, he suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless, because risk is difficult, if not impossible to compute. His preferred strategy is to be both hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive at the same time. For example, an investor might put 80 to 90% of their money in extremely safe instruments, such as treasury bills, with the remainder going into highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets with a limited downside.

Do you not see any issue with this? Relying so heavily on self-published sources (and some claims are not cited at all) is not what we typically see in the biography of a serious thinker. Pubcrawler2000 (talk) 10:51, 3 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I added 3 academic references to your text above and do not want to load the page with references. I invite you to improve the page by doing more research. Most of these are well cited Taleb has a lot of citations. But note the subtleties of context where a text about an author is technically, not self-reference in a bad way. Limit-theorem (talk) 12:08, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Can you provide any independent secondary or tertiary sources that validate Taleb's 2016 commencement appearance in Beirut as a significant event or that it introduced any ideas that RS have discussed and contextualized as being significant? This is an egregiously primary-sourced reference that fails NPOV and WEIGHT and should be removed. Thanks. SPECIFICO talk 14:51, 3 April 2022 (UTC)


 * In general, there are a lot of diploma mills declaring they gave someone an honorary doctorate, without the person knowing. In this case no such problem because both Taleb and the university acknowledge (it looks like Taleb posted it himself) and there is a video of the event, and the university is a source as to the diplomas it gave. However I do not find that quote representative of Taleb's work (it is in fact confusing), so I would remove it and post the honorary doctorate in the honors section. Limit-theorem (talk) 16:44, 3 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I will go with the consensus but I think that one must not ignore the relevance of AUB. PopulationGeneticsLevant (talk) 19:37, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

GQ and Will Self
There are a few issues with these two lines in Praise and Criticism. Firstly, the whole story is of questionable relevance - the crux of it seems to be that Taleb got a minor correction in a newspaper, which is generally not newsworthy. Secondly, the sources cited are a Huffington Post contributor (note that such contributors are considered generally unreliable as per WP:RSP) and a Reuters blog post. Reuters of course is perfectly citable, but there isn't any clarity on whether blogs hosted by Reuters are. Thirdly, I am doubtful that this exchange, if relevant in the first place, belongs in a section discussing praise and criticism.

In May 2009 interview for GQ magazine, journalist Will Self authored an article in which Taleb said his hedge fund "made $20 bln for our clients." On June 30 that year, Reuters published emails showing that Taleb explicitly corrected Self.

Pubcrawler2000 (talk) 18:40, 3 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Interesting story. It is indeed totally irrelevant and looks like it was put in here initially to blame Prof. Nassim for the correction. PopulationGeneticsLevant (talk) 19:37, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Removal of better source needed claim re: Taleb's Orthodox Christian faith
Wikipedia's policy is that self-published sources, especially those published on social media, are not to be used - or at least, are to be considered inadequate, hence better source needed - only if: the material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim; it does not involve claims about third parties; it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the source; there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity; and the article is not based primarily on such sources.

The source in question, a Tweet posted by Taleb on 27 September 2019, reads ''As an Orthodox, today was the second most important day for me (after my baptism). The highest ranking person in Orthodoxy, His Holiness Bartholomeos 1 Patriarch of Constantinople, gave me his blessing & a small gift. It was on a plane out of Constantinopolis'' and includes a picture of the two men described (Taleb and His Holiness).

The source is not self-serving; nor is it an exceptional claim on account of Taleb's provision of evidence; nor does it involve claims about third parties that might be considered high-stakes (there is no picture of the small gift mentioned by Taleb, nor is this relevant to the point of his faith); nor does it involve claims about events not directly related to the source; nor is there any reasonable doubt as to its authenticity; nor is the article based on such sources.

So, I think it might be reasonably stated in this article that Taleb is an Orthodox Christian, using his own claim as evidence, without the need for the better source needed claim. 213.205.198.204 (talk) 16:33, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Is Nassim French?
'is parents were of Antiochian Greek descent,[17] holding French citizenship.' Thewriter006 (talk) 11:21, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Incorrect alma mater
Unless Taleb got his Master's degree when he was 10 years old, it is impossible that he graduated from the University of Paris, as this institution disappeared on December 1970.

It was then split into 13 independent universities, from "Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne" to "Université Paris XIII - Paris-Nord".

It is critical to clarify from which of these 13 Parisan universities he graduated, as they were not created equal. In particular, "Université Paris VI - Pierre-et-Marie-Curie" and "Université Paris XI - Paris-Sud" were highly ranked in mathematics.

Also, unlike @24.213.126.54 said in the page history (7 August 2023‎), the 13 universities did not "continued functionally as Université de Paris, with divisions I, II,..., IX".

1) They were perfectly independent institutions.

2) They were referred to as "Université de Paris I", "Université de Paris II", ... and were never called "divisions". Karson Paisley (talk) 19:11, 7 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I read somewhere Dr Nassim say he first studied philosophy and law, then switched to economics then to econometrics. He said he did not focus on mathematics before option trading. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.196.135.46 (talk) 18:14, 9 August 2023 (UTC)