LIVE from the New York Public Library: Nassim Taleb & Daniel Kahneman

[Nassim begins speaking at time 05:50]

How do we -- as individuals and as communities -- make decisions when faced with uncertainty, inexperience, lack of knowledge or chaos? Nassim N. Taleb and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have both devoted their careers to explorations of the decision making process: Kahneman approaching it through psychological study; Taleb through a philosophical lens. Their groundbreaking work has profoundly impacted our understanding of the decision making process today while raising new questions about how decisions are made in a world that is increasingly more difficult to comprehend.

Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and philosophical essayist in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. Taleb is the author of The Black Swan (2007–2010) and Antifragile (2012). His work focuses on decision making under uncertainty, as well as technical and philosophical problems with probability and metaprobability; in other words, "what to do in a world we don't understand."

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize laureate and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University, and a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a consulting firm. Over a wide-ranging research career he has been involved in many fields of psychology, ranging from vision and attention to the study of juror behavior and the measurement of well-being. He is best known for his contributions, with his late colleague Amos Tversky, to the psychology of judgment and decision making, which inspired the development of behavioral economics. This work earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Kahneman’s recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a best-seller in several countries.

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Nassim Taleb

Daniel Kahneman