Quotes About Outcome

the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.

The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.

Because what matters in life isn't how frequently one is "right" about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn't count—in a way that's similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.

It is much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you.

This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.

Nicocles, as early as the fourth century B.C., asserts that doctors claimed responsibility for success and blamed failure on nature, or on some external cause. The

Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts.

We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We

In a nutshell, the survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the losers do not show up.

The fact that you got heads or tails on the previous flip does not change the odds of your getting heads or tails on the next one.

Randomness will be ruled out as a possible factor in the performance

But top management is only paid on result—no matter the process.

Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.

blinded by his past results.

Greenspan's actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost.

the decision maker focuses on the payoff, the consequence of the actions (hence includes asymmetries and nonlinear effects).

Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a million (as compared to nothing), but it may be better had you got zilch. (This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.)

Option = asymmetry + rationality

He paid no price for the mistake.

Have you ever wondered why so many of these straight-A students end up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting the shekels, buying the diamonds

focusing on the rationality of a belief rather than its consequences