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

182 claims · page 2 of 2

182 claims, sorted by newest said. Choose a claim to read it in full.
Verdict	Kind	Said	Claim	Topic
Unresolvable	Factual	11 Apr 2018	The first 50 to 60 pages of Skin in the Game are about asymmetry, i.e. not transferring downside to others when one has more upside than downside. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	There are more independent people today than in Roman times. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Philosophy, ethics and society
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
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The Crisis came largely from unfettered globalization, particularly from governments propping up large companies. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Economics and markets
Own records only	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Traders were allowed to conceal their inventory from outsiders they called 'the Swiss'. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Taleb's essay on the minority rule has been downloaded several million times. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The new generation does not know how to drive stick shifts. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Technology
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Taleb argued in The Black Swan against unfettered globalization, saying it would cause big systemic effects driven by governments propping up large companies. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The reason we do not drive stick shifts is the minority rule. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Economics and markets
Own records only	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Taleb does not employ a full-time assistant and instead employs people for specific tasks. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	For slightly hypertensive people, 67 persons must be treated to cure one. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Science and research methods
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The charts and data in Piketty's and Pinker's books miss elementary points of statistical significance. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Science and research methods
Own records only	Factual	10 Jul 2017	When Taleb was a trader he followed very complicated and strict ethical rules, such as never overcharging another trader. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Philosophy, ethics and society
Not yet due	Prediction	10 Jul 2017	A book that is interesting today and would have been interesting 20 years ago will probably still be interesting 20 years from now. Prediction · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
Unresolvable	Prediction	10 Jul 2017	A Broadway show that has run 300 days is likely to run about 300 additional days, 600 in total (Lindy effect). Prediction · 10 Jul 2017	Philosophy, ethics and society
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
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Powerful lobbies exist in the United States largely because of the country's scale, which makes lobbying payoffs large enough to justify the spending. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Other
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
Own records only	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Taleb said he had posted a lot of things online and organized the book based on the excitement the chapters brought, adding "Of course, not 100%." 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
Unresolvable	Factual	10 Jul 2017	Taleb made many local mistakes in his books and went back and corrected almost all of them without anybody knowing. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
Own records only	Factual	10 Jul 2017	The first 40 pages of the Skin in the Game manuscript explain skin in the game. Factual · 10 Jul 2017	Their own work or organisation
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
Own records only	Factual	11 Apr 2017	A few months later, Taleb met the man again and, while trying to shake hands with him, noticed a scar where the icepick had come out of his hand. Factual · 11 Apr 2017	Other
Own records only	Factual	11 Apr 2017	At the end of a party, a man named David stood by the coat check using a handkerchief to sop up drops of blood from his hand. Factual · 11 Apr 2017	Other
Unresolvable	Factual	11 Apr 2017	The Trinity doctrine led other monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity and caused many Christians captured by the Islamic State to be beheaded. 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
Own records only	Factual	11 Apr 2017	On seeing Donald Trump standing next to other Republican primary candidates, Taleb became certain Trump would win the primary stage regardless of what he said or did. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	18 May 2015	The dual method allows calculation of the real mean of war casualties. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	18 May 2015	The paper introduces a novel approach applying extreme value theory to fat-tailed variables that have a remote but finite upper bound. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	24 Dec 2014	The paper derives the shape of portfolio distributions that have maximum entropy subject to real-world left-tail constraints and other expectations. Factual · 24 Dec 2014	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Factual	24 Dec 2014	In practice, risk-taking agents are mandated to build portfolios by primarily constraining the tails of portfolio returns to satisfy VaR, stress testing, or expected shortfall (CVaR) conditions. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	24 Dec 2014	Risk-taking agents building portfolios under tail constraints are largely ignorant about the remaining properties of the return probability distributions. Factual · 24 Dec 2014	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Factual	24 Dec 2014	Under the paper's maximum-entropy derivation, left-tail constraints are powerful enough to override other considerations in conventional theory, making individual portfolio components of limited relevance. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Lotteries are artificial, human-constructed randomness with a known upper bound on payoffs. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Top-down centralized decisions tend to fail. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Economics and markets
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
Unresolvable	Factual	12 Dec 2012	Strategic planning has never borne fruit in empirical reality. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Economics and markets
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
Unresolvable	Factual	12 Dec 2012	In research, about 1 in 1000 trials can account for 50% of total contributions, similar to company capitalization where 1 in 1000 companies often make up 50%. Factual · 12 Dec 2012	Science and research methods
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
Unresolvable	Factual	12 Jan 2009	Humans do not understand black swans because genetically they did not evolve in an environment with many black swans. Factual · 12 Jan 2009	Philosophy, ethics and society
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
Unresolvable	Factual	2009	In 2009, Taleb said that he probably had the best track record in existence at that time, because, comparatively, other people had disappeared. Factual · 2009	Their own work or organisation
Unresolvable	Prediction	2009	Banks will become utilities, run with the responsibility of a water company. Prediction · 2009	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Prediction	2009	Banks will probably hold little risk on their balance sheets, with risks borne by individuals with capital using their own money. Prediction · 2009	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Prediction	2009	Unless banks hold less risk and risks are borne by individuals with their own capital, financial cycles will keep getting deeper each time. Prediction · 2009	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Factual	2009	Bankers kept their bonuses in each past banking crisis while taxpayers bailed the banks out. Factual · 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
Unresolvable	Factual	2009	Taleb offers a protection package to clients and it works. 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
Unresolvable	Factual	3 Apr 2008	Nassim Taleb has been telling people that banks tend to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves they are conservative and nonvolatile. Factual · 3 Apr 2008	Economics and markets
Unresolvable	Factual	3 Apr 2008	Business schools teach portfolio theory to more than 100,000 students a year. Factual · 3 Apr 2008	Field building and careers
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
Unresolvable	Factual	3 Apr 2008	In the past the financial world had a diversified ecology in which banks went bust on a steady basis. Factual · 3 Apr 2008	Economics and markets

Back to the list

Nassim Taleb

Open its page

Factual Their own work or organisation

“The first 50, 60 pages are about asymmetry in a sense that if you have more upside than downside, you make sure that you’re not transferring it to others”

Nassim Taleb, author 11 April 2018 Nassim Nicholas Taleb Interview (Art of Manliness)

The first 50 to 60 pages of Skin in the Game are about asymmetry, i.e. not transferring downside to others when one has more upside than downside.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

Judge against the published text of Skin in the Game (2018). True: the book's opening material, roughly its first 50–60 pages (allow some slack, e.g. 40–75 pages, depending on edition), is mainly about asymmetry: not moving downside or tail risk onto others while keeping upside (as in the Prologue and Book 1). Mostly true: the theme clearly dominates the opening, but the page span is somewhat off (for example it covers about 30–40 or 75–100 pages) or other topics are mixed in to a minor degree. Mixed: asymmetry is one of several roughly equal themes in the opening pages. Mostly false: asymmetry is discussed in the opening pages but is a minor theme there, or is treated mainly elsewhere in the book. False: the opening pages are about other topics and do not treat this asymmetry in any substantial way.

Evidence

skin-in-the-game-nassim-nicholas-taleb Studylib (third-party document host; hosts a copy of the book text) · 20 January 2026
“b) symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity, c) information sharing in transactions, and d) rationality in complex systems and in the real world.”
Book Review: Skin in the Game PubMed Central (National Library of Medicine, NIH) · 4 September 2018
“The main topic is that of symmetry in human affairs, expanded into a second—related—topic of symmetry in information sharing in market-type transactions. A third topic is the exposition of a survival-bound definition of rationality.”
skin-in-the-game-nassim-nicholas-taleb Studylib (third-party document host; hosts a copy of the book text) · 20 January 2026
“Skin in the Game was a segment of Antifragile under the banner: Thou shalt not become antifragile at the expense of others. Simply, asymmetry in risk bearing leads to imbalances and, potentially, to systemic ruin.”
reading-notes/2021/skin-in-the-game-taleb-2018.md at master · iechevarria/reading-notes GitHub (personal reading-notes repository of an individual reader) · 25 April 2020
“- 56 - sharia has gharar, basically requirement of equality of uncertainty”

Reasoning

The evidence shows that asymmetry in risk bearing is a stated principle of the book and that a review calls symmetry its main topic (E2, E3). It does not show where in the book these passages appear, or what the first 50–60 pages cover beyond a single note at page 56 (E4). So it does not settle whether the opening pages are mainly about asymmetry.

Cite this claim

Nassim Taleb, “The first 50 to 60 pages of Skin in the Game are about asymmetry, i.e. not transferring downside to others when one has more upside than downside.” (said 11 April 2018). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_e44717ed4dab, method 0.1.0+28da144b. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_e44717ed4dab

Claims without a verdict

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