Quotes About Chance

that the world is less random than it actually is.

The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one

Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us.

what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see.

just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.

Just as those who live by the sword die by the sword, those who earn their living taking risks will lose their livelihood taking risks.

This same point can be generalized to life: maximize the serendipity around you.

Black Swan is a sucker's problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation

I am not saying that Warren Buffett is not skilled; only that a large population of random investors will almost necessarily produce someone with his track records just by luck.

we have a tendency to underestimate the role of randomness in human affairs

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

though we play down the role of chance, especially when it comes to our own discoveries.

or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else.

The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict.

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

You were wrong for years, right for a moment, losing small, winning big, so vastly more successful than the other way

I found luck in the most unexpected of places. It is as if there were two planets: the one in which we actually live and the one, considerably more deterministic, on which people are convinced we live.

the blindness of hope

Now run the idea in reverse:

there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event.

The benefits of procrastination apply similarly to medical procedures: we saw that procrastination protects you from error as it gives nature a chance to do its job, given the inconvenient fact that nature is less error-prone than scientists.

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

There are some risks we just cannot afford to take. And there are other risks (of the type academics shun) that we cannot afford to not take.

Nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only in his failure.