Quotes About Prediction

If somebody had told me when I was in graduate school, 'Brian, in 35 years you'll get a chance to fly the first commercial spacecraft with no computers,' I'd have said, 'I don't think so. People are not going to be that stupid.'

In this business if you're good, you're right six times out of ten. You're never going to be right nine times out of ten.

A master salesperson knows what thoughts are in people's minds by the expressions on their faces, by the words they speak, by their silence, and by the "feeling" you get from within while you are in their presence. A master salesperson can predict the future by observing what has happened in the past. A master salesperson is the master of others because he or she masters himself or herself.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don't have—in their portfolio.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.

A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence.

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.

Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people - really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

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.

we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such

second fallacy lies in failing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We

but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.

our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives

Problema noastr? nu este numai c? nu cunoa?tem viitorul, ci ?i c? nu cunoa?tem nici trecutul.