I had just begun to read the book when there it was, right on the bottom of page 5: “Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do – something people who take showers discover on occasion.” I was floored. None other than Nassim Nicholas Taleb had confirmed what I always suspected. There is value in shower thinking.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the aphorisms in Taleb’s book are brilliant. At the least, most will cause you to stop, put the book down, close your eyes, and think. Some may make you want to run to any other person in the room to share it with them, in the hope that an interesting discussion might ensue. If nothing else, Taleb’s latest may be the ultimate bathroom book for thinkers.

Since this is a business column, here is one of Taleb’s many aphorisms that relate to business: “In science, you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.” Try that one out at your next Cambridge cocktail party.

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….
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page

• 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.
  • “Learning to Expect the Unexpected,” The New York Times (2004–04-08}

• We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
  • “Learning to Expect the Unexpected,” The New York Times (2004–04-08}

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.

Shared by JohnH

This post included the comment:
Taleb’s search for the absence of knowledge has been quite successful, it would seem, and has culminated in a veritable deluge of smug banality. His time might better have been spent learning Bayesian statistics – wherein the pathetic non-conundrums raised in The Black Swan are trivially resolved – or researching what actually occurred in banks.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8042337/
Which leads to a hilarious poke at NNT. Will embed it as well.

NASSIM Taleb’s book of aphorisms is now out with the the erudite title “The Bed of Procrustes”. For the few readers who lack a classical education (nil desperandum, chaps), Procrustes made travellers fit into his bed by stretching the short ones, and amputating the limbs of the tall ones.  Thus, in Taleb's analogy, do we shoehorn events into our existing world view. To put it another way, we target the wrong variable. Economists simplify the world to fit their models but that is like a tailor adjusting the client to fit a new suit.

Anyway, the book is full of insults at his least-loved professions, such as

A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

That one is food for thought for a blogger. And finally

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.