Quotes About Probability

Si veo a una mujer embarazada, el sexo del niño que lleva en su seno es para mí una cuestión puramente aleatoria (un 50% para cada sexo); pero no para el ginecólogo, que podría haber hecho una ecografía. En la práctica, la aleatoriedad es fundamentalmente información incompleta.

10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.

Median means roughly that 50% of the people die before eight months and 50% survive longer than eight months. But those who survive would live considerably longer, generally going about life just like a regular person and fulfilling the average 73.4 or so years predicted by insurance mortality tables. There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long.

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking. We will see that probability is a qualitative subject.

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

I found luck in the most unexpected of places. It is as if there were two planets: the one in which we actually live and the one, considerably more deterministic, on which people are convinced we live.

The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him.

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.

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).

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

Now run the idea in reverse:

However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds.

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.

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!

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

There are some risks we just cannot afford to take. And there are other risks (of the type academics shun) that we cannot afford to not take.

And one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random.

that we generally take risks not out of bravado but out of ignorance and blindness to probability!