Quotes About Probability

If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.

This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.

Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

Luck is the grand equalizer.

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan.

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival.

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.

It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.

This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much

Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals—one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be?