Quotes About Consequences

James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term "chaos theory." The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what if that hadn't happened?)

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it:

And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It's what you fail to imagine that kills you.

been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I'd

Brad's desk to the BATS exchange in Weehawken, was about 2 milliseconds, and the slowest, from Brad's desk to Carteret, was around 4 milliseconds. In practice, the times could vary much more than that, depending on network traffic, static, and glitches in the pieces of equipment between any two points. It took 100 milliseconds to blink your eyes; it was hard to believe that a fraction of the blink of an eye could have such vast market consequences.

When he began to grasp, along with the rest of the world, what big American firms had done—rigged credit ratings to make bad loans seem like good loans, created subprime bonds designed to fail, sold them to their customers and then bet against them, and so on—his mind hit some kind of wall. For

The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds," Danny wrote. "We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.

There is another way to think of John MacWilliams's fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. "Program management" is not just program management.

The professors argued that Netscape courted disaster from the start, by taunting Microsoft. "Mooning the Giant

With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds, by making them feel less avoidable.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

Expected utility theory wasn't exactly wrong. It simply did not understand itself, to the point where it could not defend itself against seeming contradictions. The theory's failure to explain people's decisions, Danny and Amos wrote, "merely demonstrates what should perhaps be obvious, that non-monetary consequences of decisions cannot be neglected, as they all too often are, in applications of utility theory.

What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.

If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.

It's Laissez-Faire Until You Get In Deep Shit

Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward. What

It was troubling to consider, he began, "an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of the jungle rat being given the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons." Given

a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

a penniless, jobless old college friend who had been offered several loans from banks to buy a house he couldn't afford. That's

James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term "chaos theory." The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what

My book asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

But how could I bring it up? I'd actually be asking something else, and I wasn't sure I was ready to open that box. Even if it turned out to be empty, it would never be properly reclosed. Utterance is a one-way street. Questions can never be unasked.