納西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布

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　　納西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布，1960 年出生。是安皮里卡資本公司的創辦人，，也是紐約大學庫朗數學研究所的研究員。曾在紐約和倫敦交易多種衍生性金融商品，也曾在芝加哥當過營業廳的獨立交易員。 2001年2月正式成為衍生性金融商品交易戰略名人堂的一員。獲得沃頓商學院MBA學位和巴黎第九大學的博士學位。當前最令人敬畏的風險管理理論學者。

　　納西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布在“9-11”之前大量買入行權價格很低，看似毫無價值的認沽權證，用一種獨特的方式做空美國股市，直到恐怖分子劫持飛機撞向紐約世貿大樓，由此獲利豐厚，一舉成名。此次美國次貸危機爆發之前，他又先知先覺重倉做空，從中獲利幾百萬美元。他的全球暢銷書《黑天鵝》以31種語言出版。

Taleb originates from 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 the son of Dr. Najib Taleb, an oncologist and researcher in anthropology, and Minerva Ghosn. Both sides of his family were politically prominent in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox community: on his mother's side, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were both deputy prime ministers of Lebanon; on his father's side, his grandfather was a supreme court judge and, in 1861, his great-great-great-great grandfather was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous province of Mount Lebanon.

Taleb received his bachelors and masters in science from the University of Paris and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Management Science from the University of Paris (Dauphine) under the direction of Hélyette Geman.

Taleb, a polyglot, has a literary fluency in English, French, and classical Arabic, a conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish, and reads classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew, as well as the Canaanite script.

Finance career

Taleb considers himself far less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness who used trading to attain his independence and freedom from authority, as he writes in his book, Fooled by Randomness, which became a cult book on Wall Street after it was first published in 2001. It was translated into 23 languages.

As a trader, Taleb has said he took a skeptical and anti-mathematical approach to risk and uncertainty and had a severe distrust of models and statisticians and a contempt for finance academics, especially economists. He 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. Founder of Empirica LLC after which Taleb retired from trading and became a full-time author and scholar in 2004. Taleb is currently Principal/Senior Scientific Adviser at Universa Investments, the Santa Monica, California, fund owned and managed by former Empirica partner Mark Spitznagel.

Writing and research career

Taleb became a full time researcher in 2004, as a university professor and writer. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University,[20] and Visiting Professor at London Business School. He was the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center.

As a researcher he now ranks in the top 5 out of 10,000, in number of downloaded papers, on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). His second nontechnical book, The Black Swan sold (according to Slate), as of March 2009, close to 1.5 million copies. It also spent 17 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and was translated into 31 languages. The sales of Taleb's first two books garnered an advance of $4 million for a follow-up, tentatively titled "Tinkering."

Taleb calls himself a "skeptical empiricist", but:

1. Unlike other skeptics, his skepticism is only directed to the fundamental incomputability of the probability of consequential rare events from empirical observations ("Black Swans"), though he accepts that scientific knowledge can deal with the regular ones. Taleb advocates gullibility for things that make us human without adverse consequences, matters in "Mediocristan".[24] 2. Taleb's empiricism implies resisting generalization from data and limiting the derivation of general rules from particular observations as one can be missing hidden properties. Thus he believes that scientists, economists, historians, policy makers, businessmen, and financiers are victims of an illusion of pattern. They overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable randomness in those data. 3. Taleb advocates the construction of a society around the concept of "Black Swan Robustness", by lessening the effects of interdependence associated with the low predictability of a complex system, particularly with a certain class of events he calls "extremistan".

Taleb put a psychological, mathematical, and (mostly) practical framework around the philosophical problems in a long lineage of skeptical philosophers, including Socrates, Sextus Empiricus, Al-Ghazali, Pierre Bayle, Montaigne, David Hume and Karl Popper in believing that we know much less than we think we do, and that the past should not be used naively to predict the future. Furthermore, as a practitioner he creates a decision-making framework of "how to act under incomplete understanding, imperfect information". Taleb now focuses on being a researcher in the philosophy of randomness and the role of uncertainty in science and society, with particular emphasis on the philosophy of history and the role of fortunate or unfortunate high-impact random events, which he calls "black swans", in determining the course of history.

Taleb believes that most people ignore "black swans" because we are more comfortable seeing the world as something structured, ordinary, and comprehensible. Taleb calls this blindness "the Platonic fallacy" and argues that it leads to three distortions:

1. Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have an identifiable cause,

2. Ludic fallacy: believing that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games. Taleb faults random walk models and other inspirations of modern probability theory for this inadequacy,

3. Statistical regress fallacy: believing that the structure of probability can be delivered from a set of data.

He also believes that people are subject to the triplet of opacity, through which history is distilled even as current events are incomprehensible. The triplet of opacity consists of

1. an illusion of understanding of current events,

2. a retrospective distortion of historical events,

3. an overestimation of factual information, combined with an overvalue of the intellectual elite.

Taleb, an anti-Platonist, believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. Knowledge and technology are generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering", rarely by top-down directed research.

Taleb stands against grand theories in social science. He supports experiments and fact collecting, but opposes the idea of directing our thinking into general Platonic theories that are not supported by hard data. His work is supported both by qualitative argument and by rigorous technical and quantitative analysis.

Consistent with his anti-Platonism, Taleb doesn't like to see his ideas called "theories". As he stands against general theories and top-down concepts, he never mentions theory in conjunction with the Black Swan. The phrase "Black Swan theory" is, to him, a contradiction in terms, and he urges his readers not to "Platonify" the Black Swan. Rather, Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan calls this an "anti-theory" or the "Black Swan idea".

He opposes the academic aura around economic theories, which in his view suffer acutely from the problem of Platonicity. In an article titled "The pseudo-science hurting markets", Taleb called for the cancellation of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, saying that the damage from economic theories can be devastating.

Ludic fallacy

Taleb's exposition of the Ludic fallacy in The Black Swan

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. 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.

Warning of the global banking crisis

In 2007, in The Black Swan

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ....I shiver at the thought.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events "unlikely".

Success during the 2007-2008 financial crisis

Taleb appeared to be vindicated against statisticians in 2008, as he reportedly made a multi-million dollar fortune during the financial crisis of 2007–2008, a crisis which he attributed to the failure of statistical methods in finance.

Universa, where Taleb is adviser, made returns of 65% to 115% in October 2008 in its approximately $2 billion “Black Swan Protection Protocol.”

Taleb's financial success coupled with his earlier predictions have seen him catapulted to prominence. He has appeared on numerous magazine covers and television shows to discuss his views Taleb started being treated as a "rock star" in Davos 2009 in which he had harsh words for bankers.

In an article in The Times, Bryan Appleyard described Taleb as "now the hottest thinker in the world". The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman proposed the inclusion of Taleb's name among the world's top intellectuals, citing "Taleb has changed the way many people think about uncertainty, particularly in the financial markets. His book, The Black Swan, is an original and audacious analysis of the ways in which humans try to make sense of unexpected events."