Nassim Taleb: checked claims

Scores by kind of claim

Each kind of claim is scored on its own, out of 100: the share that held up, with the range it likely falls in. Fewer resolved claims give a wider range.

Factual claims

Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

73 67 79

High confidence, 94 factual claims resolved. From 18 documents, 2008 to 2025; 19 documents sampled from 33 candidates found.

Not scored: 65 unresolvable, 9 checkable only against their own records.

See the factual claims
Predictions

Statements about events outside the person's control, checked once they fell due: did they come true?

Insufficient record: 0 predictions resolved, 5 needed for a score.

Not scored: 11 unresolvable. 2 more fall due later.
Does not yet allow for how likely each prediction was when made.

See the predictions
Promises

Commitments to the person's or organisation's own future action, with something to deliver: was it delivered?

Insufficient record: 0 promises resolved, 5 needed for a score.

Not scored: 1 checkable only against their own records.

See the promises

All types combined: 73 (likely 67 to 79, high confidence), from 94 claims: 94 factual claims. It mixes kinds of claim in different proportions for different people, so compare people kind by kind.

Nassim Taleb's claims

94 claims

94 claims, sorted by newest said. Choose a claim to read it in full.
Verdict	Kind	Said	Claim	Topic
Mostly false	Factual	28 Sep 2025	The Levant was the most stable area in the world between the early 1800s and 1948, with only skirmishes in 1860. Factual · 28 Sep 2025	Other
Mixed	Factual	25 Sep 2025	Taleb's point was that bike lanes improve well-being and happiness without generating economic growth. Factual · 25 Sep 2025	Economics and markets
Mixed	Factual	24 Sep 2025	Entities in biology and economics grow convexly then slow as they saturate; growth may be unbounded but remains sub-logarithmic. Factual · 24 Sep 2025	Science and research methods
Mixed	Factual	24 Sep 2025	If ancient populations such as hunter-gatherers and Inuit had a high incidence of cardiovascular disease, the unavoidable conclusion is that cardiovascular problems are at least half genetic. Factual · 24 Sep 2025	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	22 Sep 2025	Spitz has been bullish on markets for the past 3 years. Factual · 22 Sep 2025	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	21 Sep 2025	The 3rd edition of Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails is available and adds 3 chapters and an appendix on Max Entropy distributions including Tsallis Entropy. Factual · 21 Sep 2025	Their own work or organisation
Mixed	Factual	19 Sep 2025	Scientists who come up with new ideas and frameworks are more often experienced researchers than young ones. Factual · 19 Sep 2025	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	30 Mar 2024	The city of Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Pentateuch. Factual · 30 Mar 2024	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	18 Mar 2024	Chef Alain Ducasse in France has recently offered a bulgur or quinoa and vegetable dish resembling the "Lent Kibbeh", packaged as a "burger". Factual · 18 Mar 2024	Other
Resolved true	Factual	18 Mar 2024	Nassim Taleb has no connection to the website "nassimtaleb.org". Factual · 18 Mar 2024	Their own work or organisation
Resolved true	Factual	2023	The exceedance probability PK corresponds to the zeroeth moment and is always thin-tailed. Factual · 2023	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	2023	The exceedance probability PK, as a random variable bounded between 0 and 1, necessarily has thin tails with finite mean, variance and all moments. Factual · 2023	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	2023	If tail probability PK does not hedge tail expectation GK, then skill at predicting PK provides no information on GK. Factual · 2023	Science and research methods
Mixed	Factual	2023	Binary options on financial instruments proved of little economic value and are not considered an investment in the U.S. and the European Union. Factual · 2023	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	2023	The paper responds to Tetlock et al. (2022). (2022). Factual · 2023	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	2023	Binary options are banned by most corresponding regulators in the U.S. and the European Union because they are considered gambling devices. Factual · 2023	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	2023	A sum of such bets, whose probabilities are modelled with a Uniform or Beta distribution, becomes Gaussian rapidly. Factual · 2023	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	Nov 2021	The author's specialty is decision making under uncertainty, not theology. Factual · Nov 2021	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	Nov 2021	Shiite Islam shares many features with Christianity, such as a twelve-based structure, the last of whom is associated with Jesus, and self-flagellation rituals commemorating martyrdom. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	Nov 2021	Orthodox Christianity has stiffer dietary laws than Western Christianity, with veganism more than 200 days per year. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly false	Factual	Nov 2021	Economic forecasts work no better than astrology. Factual · Nov 2021	Economics and markets
Mixed	Factual	Nov 2021	It took about seventeen centuries from the 'eye of the needle' passage in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of organized communism and theories of social equality. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	Nov 2021	Darwinian ideas of evolutionary differences within species naturally lead to notions of eugenics, that humans can improve the race by speeding evolution. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly false	Factual	Nov 2021	During Covid, some people openly called for geronticide and for letting 'fat people' die. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	Nov 2021	The Enlightenment, with the growth of 'science', started finding statistical differences in abilities between people of different races. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mixed	Factual	Nov 2021	Christianity was the vehicle by which separation of church and state was accomplished. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	Nov 2021	Emperor Julian did not realize that paganism was a decentralized, overlapping set of club-like affiliations to gods, and tried to organize it like the Church. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mixed	Factual	Nov 2021	Europe is neither a continent, a language group nor a race, since over 100 million EU citizens are olive-skinned and hardly distinguishable from other Mediterraneans. Factual · Nov 2021	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	29 Dec 2020	A part of Fooled by Randomness was inspired by the psychology of Lebanese depositors who enjoyed steady and high returns. Factual · 29 Dec 2020	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	29 Dec 2020	The new US Dietary Guidelines were negotiated with lobbyists from the food industry, with sugar vendors treated as stakeholders. Factual · 29 Dec 2020	AI policy and governance
Resolved true	Factual	21 Dec 2020	Erdogan threatened legal action against someone who called him a dictator. Factual · 21 Dec 2020	Philosophy, ethics and society
Resolved true	Factual	17 Dec 2020	It is a common mistake to think a Lognormal(mu, sigma) distribution has mean mu and standard deviation sigma. Factual · 17 Dec 2020	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	Jul 2020	For COVID-19 survivors, the illness is a large economic drain, from lost working hours alone, not counting hospitalization costs. Factual · Jul 2020	Biosecurity
Resolved true	Factual	Jul 2020	The Netherlands builds and calibrates its dams and dykes on extreme sea levels, including those estimated by modelling the tail with extreme value theory, not on average sea level. Factual · Jul 2020	Other global risks
Mostly false	Factual	Jul 2020	In insurance, survival functions are never used for hedging; expected shortfalls are used instead. Factual · Jul 2020	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	30 Dec 2019	In 2019 Taleb gave a lecture in Lebanese, "From Ponzi to Localism", at USJ, broadcast on Lebanese TV during the riots. Factual · 30 Dec 2019	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	29 Dec 2019	It is almost always different people who are getting richer, owing to rotation at the top of the wealth distribution. Factual · 29 Dec 2019	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	29 Dec 2019	The richest 1% of people in 2019 are not quite the same individuals as the richest 1% of 2009. Factual · 29 Dec 2019	Economics and markets
Mixed	Factual	25 Dec 2019	During 2019 overwhelming DNA evidence emerged that Southern Levantines had DNA indistinguishable from that of Imperial Romans. Factual · 25 Dec 2019	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	22 Dec 2019	Levantine Arabic is not a dialect of Classical Arabic (Fus7a), according to the works of @Safaitic and @PhDniX. Factual · 22 Dec 2019	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	2019	In Hayek's account, knowledge is consolidated via prices and arbitrageurs, who trade products, services and financial securities, not binary bets. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	2019	Morgan Stanley correctly predicted the financial crisis but lost $10 billion on its hedge. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	2019	Value at Risk is not a coherent risk measure because it violates subadditivity. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	2019	Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) satisfies the coherence (subadditivity) bound. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Mostly false	Factual	2019	Financial regulators compute the recovery rate as the unconditional expected value of collateral, without conditioning on the default event. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	2019	XIV, a volatility-linked exchange traded note, went bust in February 2018 after a sudden jump in volatility, while having been able to "predict" volatility correctly. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	2019	For a continuous random variable X with CDF F_X, the variable U = F_X(X) is uniform between 0 and 1 absent additional information. Factual · 2019	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	2019	Most natural and socio-economic variables are continuous and have no compact support, so no exact upper bound is known. Factual · 2019	Science and research methods
Mostly false	Factual	2019	Since the 1960s, practically all economic and informational variables have been shown to belong to the D2 class, or at least the intermediate subexponential class, which includes the lognormal. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	2019	The expected value of collateral conditional on default is often far lower than its unconditional expectation. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	2019	Payoff terms of the form g(x) = 1 - x² are found in a typical contract called a variance swap. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	11 Apr 2018	Taleb's Incerto is so far a five-volume investigation of luck, randomness and decision making under opacity. Factual · 11 Apr 2018	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	11 Apr 2018	Only a third of Roman emperors died in their bed. Factual · 11 Apr 2018	Other
Resolved true	Factual	11 Apr 2018	Skin in the Game is the last volume of Taleb's Incerto series. Factual · 11 Apr 2018	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	11 Apr 2018	It had been reported that Donald Trump lost a billion dollars of his own money. Factual · 11 Apr 2018	Other
Mostly true	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Taleb said he believes a minimum wage is definitely a cause of more unemployment, more use of robots, or jobs moving to places with lower wages. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Skin in the Game is Volume 5 of Taleb's Incerto. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
Mostly false	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The Romans never let a free person be a steward in a big state; they wanted a slave in that role. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	10 Jul 2017	In Switzerland, authorities go to the local population and ask what they want on such matters. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	AI policy and governance
Mostly true	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Contrary to what political scientists say, people in practice do exercise the right to leave a jurisdiction. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Other
Mostly true	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Fooled by Randomness is close to 20 years old. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
Mixed	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Automatic transmissions used to be vastly more expensive than manual ones, though costs have since come down. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Technology
Resolved false	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The United States is a federation, not a republic. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Other
Mostly true	Factual	11 Apr 2017	Church councils such as Nicea and Chalcedon and various synods of bishops insisted on the dual nature (man and god) of Jesus Christ. Factual · 11 Apr 2017	Philosophy, ethics and society
Resolved true	Factual	11 Apr 2017	The Orthodox Church goes further, making the human side flow upwards rather than downwards, as in Athanasius of Alexandria's fourth-century statement that Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God. Factual · 11 Apr 2017	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	18 May 2015	A study of inter-arrival times between tail conflict events finds that no particular trend can be asserted. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	18 May 2015	The real mean of war casualties calculated by the dual method is considerably larger than the sample mean. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	18 May 2015	The paper applies extreme value theory methods to the dual distribution and derives its tail properties. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	18 May 2015	Naive observation of conflict data severely underestimates the tail risks of conflicts. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	18 May 2015	Potential war casualties are bounded by the world population. Factual · 18 May 2015	Other global risks
Resolved true	Factual	18 May 2015	The paper analyzes the robustness of its results to errors in historical reports, accounting for historians' unreliability and missing data. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	18 May 2015	The paper examines statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years and develops techniques for handling incomplete and unreliable historical data. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	18 May 2015	The paper's statistical results are at variance with prevailing claims of a "long peace", i.e. that violence has been declining over time. Factual · 18 May 2015	Science and research methods
Mostly true	Factual	24 Dec 2014	Traditional portfolio construction in modern financial theory has operated under at least one of two assumptions: constraints derived from a utility function and/or a fully known multivariate distribution of asset returns. Factual · 24 Dec 2014	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	24 Dec 2014	Under the paper's construction, the barbell payoff (maximal certainty/low risk on one side, maximum uncertainty on the other) emerges naturally. Factual · 24 Dec 2014	Economics and markets
Resolved true	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Nassim Taleb spent most of his adult life as an option trader. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Their own work or organisation
Resolved true	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Nassim Taleb calls the mistake of applying artificial-lottery logic to real-world randomness the "ludic fallacy". Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Philosophy, ethics and society
Resolved true	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Nassim Taleb says he gave the name "antifragile", for lack of a better one, to the class of phenomena that gain from disorder through a convexity bias. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Theory is born from practice more often than practice from theory, with technology more often preceding science. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Science and research methods
Resolved true	Factual	12 Dec 2012	At least five millennia passed between the invention of the wheel and the innovation of putting wheels under suitcases. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Technology
Mostly false	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Evidence from the performance of banks shows that in the real world betting against long shots does not pay. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	Banks positioned themselves with no real upside and a lot of downside from black swans, receiving a little cash flow in exchange for bearing all the downside. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	Taleb warned that financial theories, financial-risk managers and quantitative finance practitioners were dangerous to society. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	Taleb says that in The Black Swan he warned against some classes of risk people don't understand and against risk managers' tools that could not fully capture the properties of the world in which we live. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	Before Europeans discovered Australia, Europeans had no reason to believe swans could be any colour other than white, and on seeing black swans they revised their beliefs. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Philosophy, ethics and society
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	In the 1920s the German mark went from three marks to the dollar to three trillion marks to the dollar in a very short time. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Economics and markets
Mixed	Factual	12 Jan 2009	The computer, the Internet and the laser were recent technological developments that came out of nowhere and were not understood when they appeared. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Technology
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	The Internet was not built to help people communicate in chat rooms; it began as a military application and evolved. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Technology
Mostly true	Factual	12 Jan 2009	Taleb said the financial crisis occurred because people took many hidden risks, which meant a small blip could have massive consequences. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	2009	The public bore the cost of banking crises in 1983 and in 1991-1992. Factual · 2009	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	2009	Taleb said the only important thing was that he had protected his clients. Factual · 2009	Their own work or organisation
Resolved true	Factual	3 Apr 2008	Nassim Taleb worked on Wall Street for close to two decades in trading and risk management of derivatives. Factual · 3 Apr 2008	Their own work or organisation
Mostly true	Factual	3 Apr 2008	Today the entire banking system is dominated by a few very large banks, and almost all of them have the same exposures. Factual · 3 Apr 2008	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	3 Apr 2008	Taleb said that a point he had just made, which mentioned J.P. Morgan, turned out to be true with the Bear Stearns rescue. Factual · 3 Apr 2008	Economics and markets

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Nassim Taleb

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Factual Technology

“It took at least five millennia between the invention of the wheel and the innovation of putting wheels under suitcases.”

Nassim Taleb, essay author 12 December 2012 Understanding Is a Poor Substitute for Convexity (Antifragility) (Edge.org)

At least five millennia passed between the invention of the wheel and the innovation of putting wheels under suitcases.

Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.

What would count as true or false

True if the earliest accepted dating of the wheel (about 3500 BCE or earlier) and the first wheeled suitcase (patents or products from about 1970, or earlier ones) are separated by at least 5,000 years. Mostly true if the gap is just under 5,000 years (e.g. 4,800–5,000) because of dating uncertainty. Mixed if it is roughly 4,000–4,800 years. Mostly false if it is markedly less, around 3,000–4,000 years. False if it is well under that.

Evidence

Wheel - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 5 September 2001
“In Mesopotamia, depictions of wheeled wagons found on clay tablet pictographs at the Eanna district of Uruk, in the Sumerian civilization are dated to c. 3500–3350 BCE.”
Wheel - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 5 September 2001
“The oldest indirect evidence of wheeled movement was found in the form of miniature clay wheels north of the Black Sea before 4000 BCE.”
Baggage - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 12 September 2004
“The first rolling suitcase was invented by a French engineer, Maurice Partiot, who was living in the USA at that time. The patent was registered n° 2 463 713, March 8, 1949.”
The first suitcases with wheels RetroWow · 5 October 2010
“Theophilus Hokkanen filed the first patent for a suitcase with wheels in 1921.”

Reasoning

E1 dates the earliest depictions of wheeled wagons in Mesopotamia to c. 3500–3350 BCE, and E2 places indirect wheel evidence before 4000 BCE. E4 reports the first wheeled-suitcase patent was filed in 1921, and E3 cites a rolling-suitcase patent from 1949. Even using the latest wheel date (3350 BCE) and the earliest suitcase date (1921), the gap is about 5,270 years. That meets the criteria's threshold of at least 5,000 years.

Cite this claim

Nassim Taleb, “At least five millennia passed between the invention of the wheel and the innovation of putting wheels under suitcases.” (said 12 December 2012). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_bb6c10a03f87, method 0.1.0+28da144b. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_bb6c10a03f87

Claims without a verdict

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