Quotes About Prediction

Los sucesos que son no repetibles se ignoran antes de que se produzcan, y se sobreestiman después (durante un breve tiempo).

whatever they are guessing has about a 2 percent chance to fall outside their range.

It is often said that "is wise he who can see things coming." Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future

in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

The resulting measure of future uncertainty satisfies our ingrained desire to simplify even if that means squeezing into one single number matters that are too rich to be described that way.

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

Next let me show how the future is mostly in the past.

La tesis central de Popper es que, para predecir los sucesos históricos, es necesario predecir la innovación tecnológica, algo en sí mismo fundamentalmente impredecible.

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

There is actually a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

an even smaller handful managed to foresee the full extent of the damage.

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.

And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.

Contrary to what people might expect, I am not recommending that

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

Nunca pergunte, a quem quer que seja, qual é sua opinião, previsão ou recomendação. Simplesmente pergunte o que a pessoa tem — ou não — em seu portfólio de investimentos.

do not try to predict precise Black Swans—it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

The hidden harm of fragility is that you need to be much, much better than random in your prediction and knowing where you are going, just to offset the negative effect.