Nassim Taleb
Antifragile thinking against an uncertain world
Intro
Nassim Taleb has written a series of bestselling books, including Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragile, each grappling with the ideas of randomness, chance, and uncertainty that Taleb believes dominate our society.2 Taleb is a risk-taker, a peculiar and innovative thinker, a successful writer, and a controversial scholar, whose bold claims warrant a closer look. His idiosyncratic ideas have not only roused heated debates but have also greatly influenced our understanding of how to make decisions under the conditions of uncertainty that govern our world.
Nassim Taleb is an individual that likes to do things his own way. Beginning his career as an options trader, Nassim Taleb came to criticize the very ideologies that the financial world is built on.2 Despite his start on Wall Street, Nassim Taleb is known today for his unique philosophical essays on the notion that it is impossible to really ever understand the world. He refuses to do things by the status-quo; instead, he paves his own atypical approach to academia.
Nassim Taleb’s criticism and disdain of economists, journalists, bitcoiners, the technology-obsessed society, and others who make claims about how the world works make him a polarizing individual.3 Many of his fans find his take-no-prisoners approach to academia refreshingly honest, while others see him as a grumpy pessimist. In either regard, watching him engage in Twitter fights can at the very least be said to be entertaining.
If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.[1]
– Nassim Taleb, from his book Antifragile
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.
