Quotes About Chance

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

Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur

On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superstitions. Where do I draw the line? The answer is aesthetics.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note

How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

it took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances.

we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.

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

Outliers are increasingly unlikely. You

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

our successes depend on randomness).

Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.

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

cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

take a lot, a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds.

we will look at it with respect to resistance to randomness.