What is Nassim Taleb's advice on risk-taking, and how does it apply to risk management?

"It is better to take risks you understand than to try to understand risks you are taking."

The point isn't to avoid risk — it's to make sure your understanding precedes your exposure, not the other way around.

Two failure modes in practice:

• Pre-commitment ignorance: A bank launches a crypto product without studying it, then scrambles to model the risks after they're already on the balance sheet. The risk team is reverse-engineering exposure under deadline pressure — never a good place.
• Post-hoc rationalisation: A breach happens; the org now tries to explain why the risk was acceptable. The explanation is shaped by the desire for the answer to be "this was unavoidable."

The Taleb prescription applied to RM:

• Map the risk before taking the engagement.
• Be honest about which factors you can't quantify — don't pretend they're small just because you can't measure them.
• The goal of risk management isn't to avoid risk but to create risk awareness and means for risk minimisation.

Cross-link: Taleb's The Black Swan is the canonical book on the unbekannt-unwissen quadrant — risks that are unknowable in advance and dominate outcomes in the long run.