Quotes About Ambiguity

show how some degree of unpredictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species.

but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

these "computable" risks are largely absent from real life!

What do they seem to have in common?

Diversity here has to do with the degree of uncertainty inherent in the process.

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.

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.

So the reader can imagine my state of mind when

even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

They don't know what you can do with it, and will live in a state of uncertainty.

we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else.

the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

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

they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.

The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict.

what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

the blindness of hope

Now run the idea in reverse: