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Interview

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had a run-away success with The Black Swan, a book about surprise run-away successes. Constantine Sandis talks with him about knowledge and scepticism.

CS: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” the Greek poet Archilochus once wrote. Isaiah Berlin famously used this saying to introduce a distinction between two different kinds of thinkers: those who “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory,” and those who relate everything to a “single central vision… a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” Nassim, I think you would see yourself as an intellectual hedgehog. I have heard you describe your big idea, which you have had from childhood, as the view that the more improbable an outcome is, the higher its impact (and vice versa). Many controversial corollaries follow from this one claim, and you have recorded some of the most important in numerous essays, as well as in your books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

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