Quotes About Risk

Forecasting (in words) bears no relation to speculation (in deeds).

Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

fragility and absence of skin in the game.

My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans. These

we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.

Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.

since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes.

Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be more likely than a fatal flood (causing thousands of deaths) occurring somewhere in North America (which happens to include California).

We also saw the solution in forcing skin in the game.

The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that's what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their necessarily high failure rate.

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 much as it is ingrained in our habits and conventional wisdom, confirmation can be a dangerous error.

Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

take a lot, a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds.

The more uncertainty, the more valuable the option.

although no single action will have a meaningful effect.