Quotes About Impact

A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities

When he blew up, close to a couple of decades of performance were overshadowed by a single event that only lasted a few minutes.

it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.

they think in terms of actions, never interactions.

la conciencia de un problema no significa mucho, sobre todo cuando están en juego intereses personales o instituciones interesadas.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.fn3

Los emprendedores son unos héroes en nuestra sociedad. Fracasan por el resto de nosotros

All you have to do is mitigate the consequences.

the Black Swan is not just about the occurrence of some event but also about its depth and consequences.)

We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences can be—nay, generally are—more meaningful.

Como se supone que dijo Stalin (que algo sabía sobre la mortalidad): «Una muerte es una tragedia; un millón de muertes, una estadística». La estadística permanece callada en nuestro interior.

The payoff, what happens to you (the benefits or harm from it), is always the most important thing, not the event itself.

you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other.

that professionals are significantly influenced by numbers that they know to be irrelevant to their decision

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The world of contagion is so underestimated!

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

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.

how professionals can cause harm for such a long time in the name of knowledge and get away with it.

But since abundance would bring the opposite effect

the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.

could cause a loss of business