"The Scandal of Prediction" A presentation/debate with Nassim Nicholas Taleb-Travelers Club, Dec 1st. 6:30PM for 7:00 PM

Please note that the venue is the Travelers Club (106 Pall Mall) NOT The Lansdowne Club, the Junto's normal venue.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has firmly ensconced himself as one of the most colorful (and controversial) figures in finance. Rarely do I mention anyone's name and get such a "love'm or hate'em" response. Taleb made his public reputation with the publication of his now cult classic "Fooled By Randomness: The Role of Chance in Markets and in Life" in late 2001. He had been already well known to derivatives traders through the publication of his seminal work in that field, "Dynamic Hedging" in 1997. Few of us who trade derivatives did not earn our intellectual spurs by studying Taleb's book.

I was so impressed by the "Fooled By Randomness" when I first came across it that I purchased several (signed) copies and distributed them as Christmas gifts to all of the Board Members of a hedge fund I was managing at the time. Considering one of the major underlying arguments in the book (that most investment managers with outstanding track records are more lucky than smart), this probably was not the most apposite thing to do.

Taleb calls himself a "skeptical empiricist." Indeed, his current title is "Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty Isenberg School of management University of Massachusetts, Amherst." He is also Chairman of Empirica LLC, a fund of hedge funds.

Taleb's specialty (and this comes from his website www.fooledbyrandomness.com) is chance (particularly extreme & rare events); but it falls at the intersection of philosophy/epistemology (skepticism; knowledge about the dynamics of history; inferential claims), philosophy/ethics (stoicism facing random events; theories of nonhedonic happiness), mathematics (probability, statistical physics), social science/finance (opacity & incomplete information; why economists have no clue but think that they know a lot), and cognitive science (how we are all fooled by randomness).

At the Junto, Taleb will presenting the ideas in a chapter of an upcoming book "The Scandal of Prediction"- a title that is emblematic of his sometimes rhetorically provocative style. If you would like a preview, you can download a draft of his presentation on www.fooledbyrandomness.com/prediction.pdf

I am particularly pleased to have Taleb agree to present at the Junto, as has assiduously eschews mainstream business types. I successfully convinced (and I genuinely hope, accurately!) that the Junto attracts persons who can engage and challenge him on his views with an intellectual integrity and sophistication that befits this modern day Mencken of finance.