Authors Like Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Seneca

Roman · Letters to Lucilius (c. 62–65), On the Shortness of Life

Seneca was born in Córdoba around 4 BC, became tutor to the young Nero in 49 and was one of his chief advisers after Nero became emperor in 54. He was also enormously rich: in 58 an opponent accused him of amassing some 300 million sestertii through high-interest loans. His 124 Letters to Lucilius, written in his last years, are practical lessons in living with fortune you cannot control. In 65 Nero ordered him to die after the Pisonian conspiracy.

Michel de Montaigne

French · Essays (1580; expanded 1588 and 1595)

Montaigne was born in 1533 and in 1571 retired to the tower of his château near Bordeaux, where he worked among about 1,500 books. The Essays, first published in 1580, test ideas against his own experience, habits and body; his motto was the question “Que sais-je?” (“What do I know?”). In 1581 a Vatican reviewer examined the book and Montaigne was allowed to revise the passages queried. He died in 1592.

Every book by Michel de Montaigne →

Karl Popper

Austrian-British · The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Popper was born in Vienna in 1902, became a British citizen in 1945 and died in 1994. Logik der Forschung (1934; in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959) argued that scientific theories can never be proven, only falsified, and that a single counterexample is logically decisive. The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during the war, attacked grand theories of history.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Polish-born French-American · The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982), The (Mis)behavior of Markets (2004)

Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw in 1924 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2010. Early in his career he found that changes in cotton prices did not follow the bell curve that finance assumed; extreme moves came far more often. The (Mis)behavior of Markets, written with Richard L. Hudson, makes that case for general readers, and he and Taleb co-wrote a Financial Times piece in 2006.

Peter L. Bernstein

American · Capital Ideas (1992), Against the Gods (1996)

Bernstein (1919–2009) was a financial historian and economist who became one of the best-known popularisers of academic finance, and especially of the efficient-market hypothesis. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk traces how people learned to calculate probability and manage risk; Capital Ideas tells how the theories behind modern Wall Street were born.

Daniel Kahneman

Israeli-American · Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Noise (2021)

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and began working with Amos Tversky in 1969; their prospect theory appeared in 1979, and he shared the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. Thinking, Fast and Slow brought their research on biases to general readers, and Noise (with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein) looks at random variation in human judgement. He praised The Black Swan as original and audacious. He died in Switzerland in 2024.

Every book by Daniel Kahneman →

Gerd Gigerenzer

German · Gut Feelings (2007), Risk Savvy (2014)

Gigerenzer was born in Wallersdorf, Germany, in 1947. He is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and directs the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam. He argues that heuristics are adaptive tools for an uncertain world rather than evidence of irrational bias, a long-running disagreement with Kahneman and Tversky.

Philip E. Tetlock

Canadian-American · Expert Political Judgment (2005), Superforecasting (2015)

Tetlock was born in Toronto in 1954. Expert Political Judgment tested thousands of expert predictions and found them barely better than chance; Superforecasting, written with Dan Gardner, describes the Good Judgment Project he has led with Barbara Mellers since 2011, which won a US intelligence forecasting tournament. In 2023 Taleb and co-authors published a reply to a 2022 paper by Tetlock and colleagues, arguing that forecasting tournaments fail to capture tail risk.

Michael Lewis

American · Liar’s Poker (1989), The Big Short (2010), The Undoing Project (2016)

Lewis was born in New Orleans in 1960 and worked as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in London, which became Liar’s Poker. The Big Short follows the investors who bet against the housing market before 2008, and The Undoing Project tells the story of Kahneman and Tversky’s partnership. His Going Infinite (2023), about Sam Bankman-Fried, was criticised for giving too much weight to its subject’s explanations.

Every book by Michael Lewis →

James C. Scott

American · Seeing Like a State (1998), Against the Grain (2017)

Scott (1936–2024) was Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. Seeing Like a State argues that governments try to make their subjects “legible” so they can be counted, taxed and managed, and that such schemes fail when they ignore local knowledge; his examples include Soviet collective farms, Brasília and Prussian scientific forestry. Against the Grain is a deep history of the earliest states.