Here is a brief interview of Nassim Nicholas Taleb by FT Magazine, published by Financial Times. To read the complete interview and check out other resources, please click here.
Photo Credit: ©Camera Press
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“Who is my mentor? I have inverse mentors: people I learnt to not imitate,” says the scholar and philosopher.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 53, is distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. Following a career in finance, he is now the best-selling author of books that include The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: “On Robustness and Fragility” and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
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What was your childhood or earliest ambition?
I was utopian. I found adults and adulthood fundamentally corrupt, self-serving and unclear. I still do but I now find the utopian even more harmful.
Public school or state school? University or straight into work?
French lycée, whatever that means. University but largely autodidact as almost never attended classes. University is a good place to drink, make friends and discuss books, nothing else. But the education one gets there is way too commoditised.
Who was or still is your mentor?
My maternal aunt and paternal grand-uncle. They understand collective wisdom, the type of mistakes one may regret as opposed to good mistakes. I also have inverse mentors: people I learnt to not imitate.
How physically fit are you?
I lift heavy weights and sprint but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries. Like now.
Ambition or talent: which matters more to success?
Both concepts are modernist nonsense. Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
How politically committed are you?
Independent, with a Burkean bent, anti-centralised state, anti-large corporations, anti-debt – so largely localist, pro-city states and green.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent two decades as a trader before becoming a philosophical essayist and academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time either working in intense seclusion in his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity”, that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.
His works are grouped under the general title Incerto (Latin for uncertainty), composed of a trilogy accessible in any order (Antifragile, The Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness) plus two addenda: a book of philosophical aphorisms (The Bed of Procrustes) and a freely available Technical Companion. Taleb’s books have been published in thirty-three languages.
Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and “ceremonialism” debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.