Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Top Book Recommendations

Elon MuskPeter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” - Elon Mus (Source)

Mark ZuckerbergThis book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world. (Source)

Eric WeinsteinIf you really understand something that the rest of the world is confused about, and it’s an important truth, [this book] says here are all the ways you might want to make that work. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThere is something admirable about the school of the Russians: they are thinkers doing math, with remarkable clarity, minimal formalism, and total absence of unnecessary pedantry one finds in more modern texts (in the post Bourbaki era). This is of course surprising as one would have expected the exact opposite from the products of the communist era. Mathematicians should be using this book as a... (Source)

Elon MuskWritten by three experts in the field, Deep Learning is the only comprehensive book on the subject. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebVery clear exposition, does the math without getting lost in the details. Although many of the concepts of the introductory first 100 pages can be found elsewhere, they are presented with remarkable cut-to-the-chase clarity. (Source)

Satya NadellaElon Musk and Facebook AI chief Yann LeCun have praised this textbook on one of software’s most promising frontiers. After its publication, Microsoft signed up coauthor Bengio, a pioneer in machine learning, as an adviser (Source)

Dick Costolo@mikeindustries Read this excellent opposing view (of pinker generally and his previous book specifically) by John Gray (english philosopher, author of the fantastic "straw dogs, thoughts on humans and other animals") https://t.co/9TpPeKhyD7 (Source)

Mark LynasWhat I like about the book is the anti-humanism. The rejection of this idea we all have, that humanity is at the centre of the cosmos, which is a post-Christian thing. John Gray is an unreconstructed pessimist, particularly on environmental issues. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb4 hours dinner conversation with @rorysutherland and Rohan @Silva in a Pakistani restaurant in London (2 bottles of wine, but no Negroni). You must buy two copies of Rory's book, in case one is stolen, lost, damaged (by the rain), or self-destructs. https://t.co/Xa5WFOGCNt (Source)

Geoffrey MillerAgree. This is a great book by @rorysutherland that will shake up how you think about lots of things. Try it, and you'll realize you're nowhere near as epistemically humble as you should be. https://t.co/8U1iAxji8Z (Source)

Preston Pysh@rorysutherland I would love to interview you on our podcast. Your book was incredible! (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebA wonderful book on wisdom and decision-making written by a wise decision-maker. This is the kind of book you read first, then leave by your bedside and re-read a bit every day, so you can slowly soak up the wisdom. It is sort of Montaigne but applied to business, with a great investigation of the psychological dimension of decision-making. I like the book for many reasons --the main one is that... (Source)

Jason FriedFinally got to re-reading one of my favorite books: Seeking Wisdom, from Darwin to Munger. Highly recommended. (Source)

Derek SiversA great overview of the lessons of Charlie Munger (partner of Warren Buffett) - and his approach to checklists of multi-disciplinary models to guide clear thinking. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebAs a practitioner of probability, I've had to read many books on the subject. Most are linear combinations of other books and ideas rehashed without real understanding that the idea of probability harks back to the Greek pisteuo (credibility) [and pithanon that led to probabile in latin] and pervaded classical thought. Almost all of these writers made the mistake to think that the ancients were... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI read the book once when it came out. Since then I've had the chance to reread it a few times, discovering more and more layers as my interests take me in new directions(for instance the discussion on the happiness treadmill goes to the core of the current discussions in the economics of happiness). I now carry a copy on my trips as I can kill time in airports by perusing random sections. The... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI don't have time for a full review for now; all I have to say is that we have the account of a person who says it the way it was, revealing the types of truths that don't fit the New York Times and others pawns. When history is written, this will be used, not the spin by the bankers' slaves and soldiers (Geithner, Rubin et al.) Bravo Sheila! (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI could not put it down. It hit me at some point that I was at the intersection of readability and scholarship. Clearly the value of this book lies beyond its readability: Gottlieb is both a philosopher and a journalist (in the good sense), not a journalist who writes about philosophy. He investigates and provides a fresh look at the material: For instance what we bemoan as the flaws of... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebIf one is to name the single most knowledgeable person about food on planet Earth, it would be Mimi Sheraton. She is also --by far-- the most experienced food critic in an area where experience matters the most, a field in which the expert is the expert. She has an insatiable curiosity, does her homework, visits countries, argues with locals, tries all manner of restaurants, and is never fooled... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebGary Taubes is a true empiricist. I can't believe people hold on to the Platonicity of the thermodynamic theory of diet (calorie in = calorie out). Read it twice, once for the diet, once a a rich document in the history of science. (Source)

Zooko WilcoxWhen it came out ten years ago, it was the definitive study of the history and science of human nutrition in the 20th century. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI started my interest in neurobiology in December 1998 after reading a discussion by Rita Carter in the FT showing that rational behavior under uncertainty and rational decision making can come from a defect in the amygdala. Since then I've had five years of reading more technical material (Gazzaniga et al is perhaps the most complete reference on cognitive neuroscience) and thought that I... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThe general public is usually supplied by books on mathematical scientists written by "science communicators" and other outside observers--the worst by far being the academic historians of science. Their books are like reviews of comparative squid ink recipes written by anorexics, or descriptions of the Loire Valley by visually impaired travel writers. They are well written, which masks the BS.... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebMasterly! This is the page turner par excellence; every new page brings some surprise and it was impossible for me to put the book down. I even read some of it during elevator rides, not being able to resist. And truly sophisticated: Nobody but Peter Tanous would have imagined to cross James Bond with a Catholic priest.” (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI read this book after completing my exposition of overcompensation, how a stressor or a random event causes an increase in strength, in excess of what is needed, like a redundancy. I was also looking for evidence of convex reaction to stressor, or the effect of a mathematical property called Jensen's inequality in domains and found it exposed here (in other words, why a combination low dose... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI initially bought this book as I was curious about the differences between Eastern & Western traditions, particularly with the notion of theosis --the deification of man. This book goes far deeper, and covers pre-Christian practices (like Stoic thoughts, the deifications of Kings, Roman Emperors, that of private citizens who committed symbolic acts --such as Antinous, Hadrian's obsession, who... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI read Plato and the Platypus by Umberto Eco, which I found brilliant and was sucked into buying this book thinking it was about the same problem of categories. But Philosophy this is not, or if it is, it is not deep enough to give satisfaction. This is like a brief drink in an airplane lounge with someone funny, smart, witty, but not too funny. So I would give it my lowest rating: 4 stars (as an... (Source)

Noah KaganA few months ago, I was drinking a Noah’s Mill whiskey (cute) with my good buddy Brian Balfour and talking about life... During the conversation, we got on the topic of books that changed our lives. I want to share them with you. I judge a book's success if a year later I'm still using at least 1 thing from the book. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebOne of the author, Baz, gave me a copy of this book when it came out and it went to sleep in my library as I was not in a finance mood. I forgot about it until this week as I was stuck on a problem related to risk-neutral pricing and the Girsanov theorem concerning changes in probability measure. I looked at every passage on the the subject until I hit on it. Then I realized that I should have... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebMaggie Mahar had the courage to take a look at what was behind all of this religious belief in markets. Clearly I do not understand how she was able to work as a journalist when she has the attitude and mindset of a truth-seeker. I spent some time looking at the difference between her book and Lowenstein's: not even possible to start comparing. One needs to be a trader to value her work. Read... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThe fact that top-down development methods are great on paper but have not produced benefits ("so far") is a point Easterly has made before, heavily influencing yours truly in the formation his own argument against naive interventionism and the collection of "humanitarians" fulfilling their personal growth and shielding themselves from their conscience... This is more powerful: the West has been... (Source)

Robert BaerThis book is all about Italians stationed on a remote Eurasian frontier. Of course they never were, but The Tartar Steppe is a metaphor for devoting your life to a higher good, for wanting to do public service and to make a difference. And you essentially give up everything. The main character, Giovanni Drogo, gives up his fiancée, his mother and his friends to wait for the Tartars who never... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThe mathematics of extreme events, or the remote parts of the probability distributions, is a discipline on its own, more important than any other with respect to risk and decisions since some domains are dominated by the extremes: for the class of subexponential (and of course for the subclass of power laws) the tails ARE the story. Now this book is the bible for the field. It has been... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI found this copy last week at Waterstone in London . It made me feel the plane ride was very short! I should have bought a couple. This is a great book for a refresher in analytical philosophy: pleasant, clear. Great training for people who tend to forget elementary relationships. I did not know that JAP was a logician. Go buy this book! The only competition is "Think" by Blackburn (rather... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebVery useful book, particularly in what concerns alternative L-Stable distributions. True, not too versed in financial theory but I'd rather see the author erring on the side of more physics than mathematical economics. As an author I don't ask much from books, just to deliver what they indend. This one does. Clear historical description of Einstein/Bachelier. Hopefully one day we will call... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThe best intuition builder in both statitics and econometrics. I have been reading the various editions throught my career. Please, keep updating it, Peter Kennedy! (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis book has wonderful qualities that I am certain will be picked up by other reviewers. But I would like to add the following. This is the most profound examination of how nationality is enforced on a group of people, with the internal colonization process and the stamping out of idiosyncratic traits. As someone suspicious of government and state control, I was wondering how France did so well... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI spent my life focusing on the errors of statistics and how they sometimes fail us in real life, because of the misinterpretation of what the techniques can do for you. This book is outstanding in the following two aspects: 1) It is of immense clarity, embedding everything in real situations, 2) It uses the real-life situation to critique the statistical model and show you the limit of... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebPeople vote with their wallet --particularly when they do it a second time, when they REpurchase. Those who believe in the "revelation of preferences" should note that there are books one buys again when a copy is lost --particularly when they are read cover to cover. I am buying another copy of this book as mine was lost or misplaced. That should speak volumes. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebUntil I read this book, Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life. This is, remarkably a very similar story about the antichamber of anticipation (rather than "the antichamber of hope" as I called Buzzati's book), but written in a much finer language, by a real writer (Buzzati was a journalist, which made... (Source)

Ryan HolidayThere is plenty to study and see simply by looking inwards — maybe even an alarming amount. (Source)

Alain de BottonI’ve given quite a lot of copies of [this book] to people down the years. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is not a polularization /adult-education style presentation. Magee sees things form the inside; it is his own formation of philosophical ideas & techniques that we witness. Magee was close enough to Popper to present us with his ideas first-hand (nobody reads Popper; people read about him). He also debunks a few idiotic myths about Wittgenstein as an atomist (Magee read W and realized that... (Source)

James Owen WeatherallWhat Mandelbrot realised early on, at the start of the 1960s, was that the kind of assumptions about statistics that everyone was making were wrong. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebYou are a hot shot in a company, though not the boss. You are paid extremely well, but, again you have plenty of bosses above you (say the partners of an investment firm). Is it better than deriving a modest income being your own boss? The counterintuive answer is NO. You will live longer in the second situation, even controlling for diet, lifestyle, and genetic predispositions. Marmot spent... (Source)

James Owen WeatherallI think of this book as the gold standard of what ideas from mathematics and physics can do. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThere are two methods to consider in a risky strategy. 1) The first is to know all parameters about the future and engage in optimized portfolio construction, a lunacy unless one has a god-like knowledge of the future. Let us call it Markowitz-style. In order to implement a full Markowitz- style optimization, one needs to know the entire joint probability distribution of all assets for the entire... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis book takes us through the formulation of the theorems in "On Landau damping" by Clément Mouhot and Cédric Villani. Villani is playful in real life, his research is playful, and the book is playful. This is a gem for a singular reason. One sees exactly how Villani (or a pure mathematician) goes from abstract to abstract without ever exiting the world of pure and symbolic mathematics, even... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebIf you like the thinker's prose, the so-called "romantic science",a style attributed to the Russian neuroscientist A. R. Luria,which consists in publishing original research in literary form, you would love this book. Clearly intellectual scientists are vanishing under the weight of the commoditization of the discipline. But once in a while someone emerges to reverse such setbacks. Goldberg, who... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebWe Sherlock Holmes fans, readers, and secret imitators need a map. Here it is. Peter Bevelin is one of the wisest people on the planet. He went through the books and pulled out sections from Conan Doyle's stories that are relevant to us moderns, a guide to both wisdom and Sherlock Holmes. It makes you both wiser and eager to reread Sherlock Holmes. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI read the review of Simon Blackburn trashing the book: Eco made a few mistakes concerning the two dogmas of empiricism (he confused Davidson's work with Quine's first dogma). So I am sure many readers hesitated after a review by such a rigorous big gun thinker as Blackburn. When I started reading the book I was taken aback by the combination of depth and the vividness of the style. Eco is... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb@Stefano_Peron This is the BEST book (Source)

Eric WeinsteinFolks frequently ask “What are the books that changed your life?” If I tell them, they are usually radically disappointed. I find that curious. I just cleared out of an office, and these are 4 shelves of spines of books that mattered enough to me to bring home. So here they are. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI know which books I value when I end up buying a second copy after losing the first one. This book gives a complete overview of the basis of probability theory with some grounding in measure theory, and presents the main proofs. It is remarkable because of its concision and completeness: visibly prof Varadhan lectured from these notes and kept improving on them until we got this gem. There is... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebPhilosophy has been under severe challenge from science, literally eating up its provinces: philosophy of mind went to neuroscience; philosophy of language to Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science,etc. This book shows that there is a need for someone to just specialize in the TRUTH, its scructure, its accessibility, its INVARIANCE. Aside from the purely philosophical answers that... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI read this book twice. The first time, I thought that it was excellent, the best compendium of ideas of social science by arguably the best thinker in the field. I took copious notes, etc. I agreed with its patchwork-style approach to rational decision making. I knew that it had huge insights applicable to my refusal of general theories [they don't work], rather limit ourselves to nuts and bolts... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebControlled experiment can easily show absence of design in medical research: you compare the results of top-down directed research to randomly generated discoveries. Well, the U.S. government provides us with the perfect experiment for that: the National Cancer Institute that came out of the Nixon "war on cancer" in the early 1970s. "Despite the Herculean effort and enormous expense, only a few... (Source)

Tom HollandWe tend not to think of Christianity as being an expression of Roman civilisation but in so many ways it is, even though it radically transformed the empire. Robin Lane Fox’s book is the best modern account that I can think of which will give people the sense of how this remarkable revolution took place. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebAs a speculator I learned to take the best from books and ideas without arguments (many readers seem to be training to be shallow critics)--good insights are hard to come by. One does not find these in the writings of a journalist. There are some things personal to the author that might be uninteresting to some, but I take the package. The man is one of the greatest traders in history. There are... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI am relieved to finally find a book that deals with Black Swan Events in a new way. Ayache brings a reverse-probabilistic perspective: instead of considering that a price is the result of probabilistically derived expectation, he reverses the issues and investigates these artificial constructs as "probabilities" and "expectations" as secondary, derived, fictitious concepts that we bring about to... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebExcellent, be it only for the presentation of the difference between the pompous scholastic thinker laboring in the academy and the other nonacademic humanist laboring in the the "luxe calme et volupte" of his study. Another of the attributes is the readability of the work Le Goff is a gifted writer. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebIf your interests are limited to mystery books, nothing else, this book is not for you. I initially bought this book because of the title, thinking that we would have a female version of Her Professor Dr Dr (Hon.) Moritz-Maria von Igenfeld, the Pninish uberscholar philologist who wrote the seminal Portugese Irregular Verbs ("after which there was nothing left to discuss about the subject,... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a "critical" state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that. Some people are critical of Bak's approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these "sandpile" effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebHere is what I wrote in my endorsement: Emanuel Derman has written my kind of a book, an elegant combination of memoir, confession, and essay on ethics, philosophy of science and professional practice. He convincingly establishes the difference between model and theory and shows why attempts to model financial markets can never be genuinely scientific. It vindicates those of us who hold that... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebIf you want an introduction to information theory, and, in a way, probability theory from the real front door, this is it. A clearly written book, very intuititive, explains things, such as the Monty Hall problem in a few lines. I will make it a prerequite before more technical great books, such as Cover and Thompson. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis critique of the computational theory of mind and the pan-adaptionist tradition is clearly so honest that it goes after the ideas promoted by Fodor's own 1983 watershed book "The Modularity of Mind". In brief the essay is an attack on massive modularity by saying that there are things after all that escape the programming (encapsulation and opacity are key: how can we talk about something... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is a great book but I felt something cold inside of me while reading it. I don't know if it is cultural (the modern English philosopher's fear of displaying passion) but I had the feeling to talk to a plumber who developed expertise in abstract concepts and their relationships just as if they were small plumbing problems fitting together under a generalized plumbing theory. Perhaps... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI feel guilty for not having posted a review earlier: I owe a lot to this book. I figured out the value of intensity training and maximizing recovery. I use the ideas but with minor modifications (my own personal workout is entirely based on free weights and barbells, but I incur --and accept --a risk of injury). I have been applying the ideas for more than three years. Just get over the... (Source)

Rob Leathern@MikeIsaac Get this book. 12 mins a week... love it; it’s not the end-all but I’ve found these approaches better than regular gym https://t.co/s8KRF8luKs (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is something very hard to find, almost by definition: a literary writer who thinks in abstract terms (the only other such author I've read is Stanislaw Lem). These are philosophical thought experiments in their purest form, yet somehow magically delivered in a playful literary athmosphere. Borges is a mathematical philosopher, first and last. Ignore the "Latin American" categorization and... (Source)

Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerBorges asks what happens if we can’t forget? Will we be forever tied to an excruciatingly detailed past? Or will we be able to forget parts of it over time and therefore be able to evolve and move on? (Source)

Mohsin HamidThere is a transnational quality to Borges’s writing. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is not just an important but an imperative project: to approach the problem of randomness and success using the state of the art scientific arsenal we have. Barabasi is the person. (Source)

Vinod KhoslaThis book transforms how our success-obsessed society approaches their professional careers and long-term goals. (Source)

Vinod KhoslaThis book transforms how our success-obsessed society approaches their professional careers and long-term goals. (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI am glad to find a complete book dealing with all aspects of consciousness in CLEARLY written format, with graphs and tables to facilitate comprehension. The book covers everything I had seen before from Artificial Intelligence to Philosophy to Neurology to Evolutionary Biology. Say one wants to get an idea of Dan Dennett's theory of consciousness (without having to get through Dennett's... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebWhen readers and students ask to me for a useable book for nonmathematicians to get into probability (or a probabilistic approach to statistics), before embarking into deeper problems, I suggest this book by the Late A. Papoulis. I even recommend it to mathematicians as their training often tends to make them spend too much time on limit theorems and very little on the actual "plumbing". The... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThere is no way we Levantines can learn the language of our ancestors in an organic way except via nerds insisting on 1) grammar, 2) writing in one of the unwieldy Syriac scripts that one cannot even read on a computer screen without dowloading strange fonts. But Aramaic is still spoken, let us take advantage of it, and figure out how to say "I want to eat mjaddara" rather than memorize poetry by... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is an outstanding book on the side effects of interventionism, written in extremely elegant prose and with maximal clarity. It documents how people find arguments couched in moralistic terms to intervene in complex systems they don't understand. These interventions trigger endless chains of unintended consequences --consequences for the victims, but none for the interventionistas, allowing... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebThis is a must read as it presents a comprehensive set of the principles and axioms behind neo-classical economics. Binmore is a mathematician, hence everything is mapped properly, clearly, and thoroughly. I spent several days in a seminar with Binmore and was surprised to discover, from his arguments, that much of the criticism against the foundations of decision theory are strawman. For the... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebVery comprehensive, sufficiently technical to get most of the plumbing behind machine learning. Very useful as a reference book (actually, there is no other complete reference book). The authors are the real thing (Tibshirani is the one behind the LASSO regularization technique). Uses some mathematical statistics without the burdens of measure theory and avoids the obvious but complicated... (Source)

Nassim Nicholas TalebI will write a longer review, but this is a monument, not just a book. And the beginning of a new cultural program. On a scale of 0 to 100, paternity tests count as 99.99 and written/oral history should count for .01. Apply that to populations. That’s plain statistics/probability. We are seeing science in action: information theory displaces BS, the handwaving just so stories we got from... (Source)