Quotes About Risk

If you hear a prominent economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.

The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

This idea that 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.

How much you truly "believe" in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

Scars signal skin in the game.

Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.

It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside

No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.

An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.

Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.

what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you've learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic—even then—your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.