Quotes About Probability

Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones.

I count myself one of those).

If you believe that witnessing an additional white swan will bring confirmation that there are no black swans, then you should also accept the statement, on purely logical grounds, that the sighting of a red Mini Cooper should confirm that there are no black swans.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and

Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

take a lot, a lot of imprudent risks themselves and be blinded by the odds.

we will look at it with respect to resistance to randomness.

although no single action will have a meaningful effect.

It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

as they think that they will beat the odds.

Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown).

options pushed me to study the math of probability.

the nonlinearity (that is, the asymmetry, with more upside than downside; asymmetry is a form of nonlinearity).

Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.

when its wording is slightly modified.

True equality is equality in probability. and Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting.

people's understanding of probability does not translate into their behavior).

longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event.

Most of the examples used in this book were created with my Monte Carlo generator, which I introduce in this chapter. Yet it is far more a way of thinking than a computational method. Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.

No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.