Quotes About Risk

the courage to put forth their ideas

The world of contagion is so underestimated!

We can see that my activity in the market (and other random variables) depends far less on where I think the market or the random variable is going so much as it does on the degree of error I allow around such a confidence level.

people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.

the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future.

Freedom entails risks—real skin in the game. Freedom is never free.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy. It is also necessarily collective on epistemological grounds—to facilitate the development of expertise.

o sucesso de um escritor, uma empresa, uma ideia, um músico, um atleta, tem de ser planetário, ou equivale a nada. Esses efeitos pioram a previsibilidade, já que hoje quase tudo na vida socioeconômica é dominado por Cisnes Negros. Nossa sofisticação faz com que continuamente coloquemos os carros na frente dos bois, criando coisas que somos cada vez menos capazes de compreender

the mistake may turn out to be inconsequential. Or

So our mission in life becomes simply "how not to be a turkey

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.

With respect to Black Swans, you act to protect yourself from negative ones (or expose yourself to positive ones) even though you may have no evidence that they can take place

the feeling of false stability.

setting wealth back by several decades

los «modernos» intentan innovar partiendo de una situación de comodidad, seguridad y previsibilidad en lugar de aceptar la noción de que la inventiva surge de la necesidad.

The hidden costs of health care are largely in the denial of antifragility.

they make sure that the costs of being wrong are limited (and their probability is not derived from past data).

Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge

my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But

He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus.

This is called a stop loss, a predetermined exit point, a protection from the black swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is exactly like saying that nuclear bombs are safer because they explode less often.