The central disagreement between Taleb and the superforecasting project is binary versus continuous payoffs: binary options lose value when tails fatten (because probabilities of being above/below a threshold drop), whereas continuous payoffs benefit from tail fattening.

causalpending

Speaker

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Evidence Quote

the naive person would come in and think a an out of-the money binary option would go up in value when you fatten the tail in fact they go down in value when you fting the tail because the binary is a probability so I mean just to to give you the intuition if I take the the the the gum curve plus or minus one Sigma is about 68% if I fatten the tail exiting in other words the probabilities of being above or below actually they drop you see why because you have the the the variance is more explained by rare events the the body distribution goes up

Source

Nassim Taleb — Meditations on ExtremistanJoseph Noel Walker
Created: 8/11/2026, 7:44:21 AM

My Notes

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