Quotes About Probability

but would treat cost of search as "loss.

My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.

every search has incrementally a higher probability of yielding a result

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

otherwise the odds would be too low to get here just by luck.

Risk and ruin are different tings.

A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I

Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.

because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness.

It qualified as a Black Swan, but I did not know the expression then.

the concept of median used in medical research does not characterize a probability distribution.

To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best.

He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*

The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models

Mi idea es que algunos resultados científicos no sólo son inútiles en la vida real, porque infravaloran el impacto de lo altamente improbable (o nos llevan a ignorarlo), sino que es posible que algunos de ellos estén creando en realidad Cisnes Negros.

with unknown side effects

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).

la acción del Cisne Negro se sitúa en Extremistán, no es más que una mera aproximación; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos más de lo que sea necesario.

When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total.