Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quote
From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the three meals a day, eat in moderation idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.But Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity) knew it, of course-just as they knew the need for debt avoidance-and so they had fast days.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans-we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the three meals a day, eat in moderation idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.But Near Eastern religions (Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity) knew it, of course-just as they knew the need for debt avoidance-and so they had fast days.
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About Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 (notably, The Black Swan and Antifragile). He has been a professor at several universities, serving as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008. He has been co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader, and is currently listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments. The Sunday Times called his 2007 book The Black Swan one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.
Taleb criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He proposes what he has termed "antifragility" in systems; that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility, as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research.