Quotes About Risk

This absence of penalty makes them antifragile at the expense of the society

at any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders.

Black Swan is a sucker's problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation

because these professions are more immune to randomness.

While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%).

the second lesson is more aggressive: you can actually take advantage of the problem of prediction and epistemic arrogance!

I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obtained by multiplying the probabilities by the corresponding outcomes).

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

but runs the risk of killing a few, with a net benefit to society.

Such income provides them some insulation from randomness.

There is no evolution without skin in the game.

fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings.

This dovetails into the "barbell" strategy of taking maximum exposure to the positive Black Swans while remaining paranoid about the negative ones.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work

Recall that Fat Tony was in favor of just "making a buck" as opposed to being "proven right.

The effect of the leverage is that a small loss would be compounded and would wipe him out.

The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict.

Web-shaming is much more powerful than past reputational blots, and more of a tail risk.

Your life came under a serious threat but, having survived it, you retrospectively underestimate how risky the situation actually was.

10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.

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

Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.

soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives