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

48 claims

48 claims, sorted by newest said. Choose a claim to read it in full.
Verdict	Kind	Said	Claim	Topic
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
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
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
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
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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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 true	Factual	2019	The expected value of collateral conditional on default is often far lower than its unconditional expectation. Factual · 2019	Economics and markets
Mostly true	Factual	11 Apr 2018	Only a third of Roman emperors died in their bed. Factual · 11 Apr 2018	Other
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

Open its page

Factual Their own work or organisation

“adds 3 chapters and an appendix on Max Entropy distributions (includes Tsallis Entropy).”

Nassim Taleb, author, posting on X 21 September 2025 Post by @nntaleb on X, 2025-09-21 (X)

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.

Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.

The second judge said mixed; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

Judged as of 2025-09-21. True: a 3rd edition of 'Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails' was available (published or released) by about that date and, compared with the 2nd edition, adds three new chapters and an appendix on maximum-entropy distributions that covers Tsallis entropy. Mostly true: the edition was available and adds the appendix with Tsallis content, but the chapter count differs slightly (e.g. two or four). Mixed: the edition exists, but only one of the added components (the chapters or the Max Entropy/Tsallis appendix) is confirmed. Mostly false: the edition was only announced or in preprint, not available, by the date. False: no 3rd edition existed, or it lacks these additions.

Evidence

Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications arXiv · 17 September 2025 Own record
“The third edition corrects minor typos and adds 3 chapters synthesized from published papers plus an appendix on maximum entropy distributions.”
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications arXiv · 17 September 2025
“[v4] Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:38:53 UTC (33,303 KB)”
Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails (Taleb) QuantFinanceWiki · 10 September 2026
“This third expanded edition includes three additional chapters and an appendix.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Releases 3rd Edition of Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails Nassim Taleb .org (UNOFFICIAL news site) · 23 September 2025
“On September 23, 2025 By Admin In Academic, Links, Statements, Writing, X”

Reasoning

The arXiv record shows version v4 of the book was posted on 17 September 2025, before the judging date [E2]. The abstract of that version, written by the author, says the third edition adds 3 chapters drawn from published papers plus an appendix on maximum entropy distributions [E1]. A later third-party wiki independently confirms that the third edition adds three chapters and an appendix [E3]. None of the quoted evidence confirms that the appendix covers Tsallis entropy, so that one detail of the claim is unverified.

Cite this claim

Nassim Taleb, “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.” (said 21 September 2025). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_6f5417fab787, method 0.1.0+28da144b. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_6f5417fab787

Claims without a verdict

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