Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Praise and Criticism

Praise and Criticism

In a 2008 article in The Times, the journalist 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, saying "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." Taleb was treated as a "rock star" at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in 2009; at that event he had harsh words for bankers.

Taleb contends that statisticians can be pseudoscientists when it comes to risks of rare events and risks of blowups, and mask their incompetence with complicated equations. This stance has attracted criticism: the American Statistical Association devoted the August 2007 issue of The American Statistician to The Black Swan. The magazine offered a mixture of praise and criticism for Taleb's main points, with a focus on Taleb's writing style and his representation of the statistical literature. Robert Lund, a mathematics professor at Clemson University, writes that in Black Swan, Taleb is "reckless at times and subject to grandiose overstatements; the professional statistician will find the book ubiquitously naive."

Aaron Brown, an author, quant and finance professor at Yeshiva and Fordham Universities, said that "the book reads as if Taleb has never heard of nonparametric methods, data analysis, visualization tools or robust estimation." Nonetheless, he calls the book "essential reading" and urges statisticians to overlook the insults to get the "important philosophic and mathematical truths." Taleb replied in the second edition of The Black Swan that "One of the most common (but useless) comments I hear is that some solutions can come from 'robust statistics.' I wonder how using these techniques can create information where there is none". While praising the book, Westfall and Hilbe in 2007 complained that Taleb's criticism is "often unfounded and sometimes outrageous." Taleb's contentious style, they say, "describes writers and professionals as knaves or fools, mostly fools. His writing is full of irrelevances, asides and colloquialisms, reading like the conversation of a raconteur rather than a tightly argued thesis." Taleb felt that academics showed "bad faith" by criticizing a literary book that claimed to be a literary book and by ignoring the empirical evidence provided in his appendix and more technical works.

The late Berkeley statistician David Freedman said that efforts by statisticians to refute Taleb's stance have been unconvincing. Taleb wrote in the second edition of The Black Swan that he had a session in 2008 with statisticians in which the hostility changed:

I found out that telling researchers "This is where your methods work very well" is vastly better than telling them "This is what you guys don’t know." So when I presented to what was until then the most hostile crowd in the world, members of the American Statistical Association, a map of the four quadrants, and told them: your knowledge works beautifully in these three quadrants, but beware of the fourth one, as this is where the Black Swans breed, I received instant approval, support, offers of permanent friendship, refreshments (Diet Coke), invitations to come present at their sessions, even hugs(...) They tried to convince me that statisticians were not responsible for these aberrations, which come from people in the social sciences who apply statistical methods without understanding them.

Taleb and Nobel laureate Myron Scholes have traded personal attacks, particularly after Taleb's paper with Espen Haug on why nobody used the Black-Scholes-Merton formula. Taleb said that Scholes was responsible for the financial crises of 2008, and suggested that "this guy should be in a retirement home doing Sudoku. His funds have blown up twice. He shouldn't be allowed in Washington to lecture anyone on risk." Scholes retorted that Taleb simply "popularises ideas and is making money selling books". Scholes claimed that Taleb does not cite previous literature, and for this reason Taleb is not taken seriously in academia. Haug and Taleb (2011) listed hundreds of research documents showing the Black-Scholes formula was not Scholes' at all and argued that the economics establishment ignored the literature by practitioners and mathematicians (such as Ed Thorp), who had developed a more sophisticated version of the formula.

Citing his academic works on the same topics covered in The Black Swan, Taleb said that "Academics should comment on data there, not make technical comments on a literary book". He has said that no direct published criticism has been directed at his ideas, but rather at his person and style. He wrote, "you never win an argument until they attack your person." In an interview on Charlie Rose, Taleb said that he was pleased that none of the criticism he received for The Black Swan had any substance, as it was either unintelligent, ad hominem, or style over substance, which convinced him to "go for the jugular" with a huge financial bet on the breakdown of statistical methods in finance.

Taleb's aggressive attitude against the finance industry has led to personal attacks, including a smear campaign and death threats from former employees of Lehman Brothers.