Quotes About Risk

is often a good career move for an author.

And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.

This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation "theory" is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories.

if something is fragile, its risk of breaking makes anything you do to improve it or make it "efficient" inconsequential unless you first reduce that risk of breaking. As Publilius Syrus wrote, nothing can be done both hastily and safely—almost nothing.

after the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking—little else.

In fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America's specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country's disproportionate share in innovations. Once established, an idea or a product is later "perfected" over there. Volatility

I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)

There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail.

In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, though perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized

How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.

Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of "skin in the game." Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm.

And, what's worse, we didn't get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.

Yet in practice it is the negative that's used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of entertainers called Wall Street "economists" or "strategists," who make pronouncements on the fate of the markets, but do not engage in any form of risk taking, thus having their success dependent on rhetoric rather than actually testable facts.

The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs.

Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.

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. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcomes that counts.

Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer…

The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck.