Yeah, he probably wouldn’t actually have said “Make sure you mention …”. But he might well have taken care to ensure that the journalist knows that he predicted those things.
(Where “knows” might be the wrong word, to whatever extent he didn’t actually predict them.)
Let’s imagine the journalist asked him: “Is it true that you predict the financial crash of 2008?”
Taleb might have answered: “In my book, I wrote that the financial system is likely to blow up. Various journalists described this as me predicting the financial system. I don’t think that it’s possible to predict the exact year when a system crashes.”
Journalists are in the business of simplifying reality for their readers. It’s quite likely that what Taleb told the journalist, in this case, is completely true but the journalist then simplified the complexity of the statement in something that’s optimized to get the highest number of page views.
Yeah, he probably wouldn’t actually have said “Make sure you mention …”. But he might well have taken care to ensure that the journalist knows that he predicted those things.
(Where “knows” might be the wrong word, to whatever extent he didn’t actually predict them.)
Let’s imagine the journalist asked him: “Is it true that you predict the financial crash of 2008?”
Taleb might have answered: “In my book, I wrote that the financial system is likely to blow up. Various journalists described this as me predicting the financial system. I don’t think that it’s possible to predict the exact year when a system crashes.”
Journalists are in the business of simplifying reality for their readers. It’s quite likely that what Taleb told the journalist, in this case, is completely true but the journalist then simplified the complexity of the statement in something that’s optimized to get the highest number of page views.