Quotes About Risk

Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called "efficiency" that makes people now sail too close to the wind.

Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.

At the time of writing, most big recent successes (Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google) were started by people with skin and soul in the game and grew organically—if they had recourse to funding, it was to expand or allow the managers to cash out; funding was not the prime source of creation. You don't create a firm by creating a firm; nor do you do science by doing science.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict.

You were wrong for years, right for a moment, losing small, winning big, so vastly more successful than the other way

Another recent event is the almost-instant bankruptcy, in 1998, of a financial investment company (hedge fund) called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which used the methods and risk expertise of two "Nobel economists," who were called "geniuses" but were in fact using phony, bell curve–style mathematics while managing to convince themselves that it was great science and thus turning the entire financial establishment into suckers.

The dip in the market was not very large. It was just that his leverage was enormous.

Cuál es la probabilidad de morir en un accidente aéreo?», por ejemplo, las personas aumentan el grado de probabilidad. Sin embargo, Slovic y sus colegas descubrieron, en patrones del mundo de los seguros, que en las pólizas la gente se olvidaba de esos sucesos altamente improbables. Dichos investigadores llaman a este fenómeno «la preferencia por asegurarse contra pequeñas pérdidas probables», a expensas de las menos probables pero de mayor impacto.

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible." "Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system." "This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing." "Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Bent Flyvbjerg (do capítulo 18) mostrou, em seu Black Swan Management [Gerenciamento do Cisne Negro], a

c) If the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).

Le processus de la découverte (ou de l'innovation, ou du progrès technologique) dépend lui-même d'un bricolage antifragile, d'une brusque prise de risques plutôt que d'une culture formelle.

Los sucesos que son no repetibles se ignoran antes de que se produzcan, y se sobreestiman después (durante un breve tiempo).

Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

Now run the idea in reverse:

And as a risk taker, only time counts—for I could fool my accountant with steady earnings with a lot of hidden risk, but time will eventually reveal them.

there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event.

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger.

those who don't take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

Even trial and error are a form of barbell.

whatever they are guessing has about a 2 percent chance to fall outside their range.

yet people do it out of the foolish risk-taking trait that pushes us to jump into such adventures blinded by the outcome.