Quotes About Probability

On alternative histories, a probabilistic view of the world, intellectual fraud, and the randomness wisdom of a Frenchman with steady bathing habits. How journalists are bred to not understand random series of events.

and I should base my decisions around that.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence of Black Swans in the record doesn't mean these were not there.

Los Cisnes Negros que imaginamos, de los que hablamos y nos preocupamos no se parecen a los que previsiblemente son Cisnes Negros. Como veremos a continuación, nos preocupamos de los sucesos «improbables» equivocados.

The bias lowers our perception of the risks we incurred in the past, particularly for those of us who were lucky to have survived them. Your

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.

Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

or "what are the ten best books

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

They would prefer a defective forecast to nothing.

In other words, it will not be Black Swan driven.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. … Mother Nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table … In this book, considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door.

this avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent—and most conspicuous—and that is the world of markets. By

The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider

The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is.

the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.

When we look at risks in Extremistan, we don't look at evidence (evidence comes too late), we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.

Our resources (both cognitive and scientific) are limited, perhaps too limited. Those who distract us increase the risk of Black Swans.