Quotes About Ambiguity

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

The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform.

and I should base my decisions around that.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence of Black Swans in the record doesn't mean these were not there.

in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.

or "what are the ten best books

Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.

They would prefer a defective forecast to nothing.

In other words, it will not be Black Swan driven.

major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door.

Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

he is far from headquarters and has no idea of his minute-to-minute standing in the firm except through signals.

the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.

With respect to Black Swans, you act to protect yourself from negative ones (or expose yourself to positive ones) even though you may have no evidence that they can take place

the feeling of false stability.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

would not have been strongly drawn to such pursuits anyway.

Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.

If we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find [the] same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud.