Quotes About Probability

In the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns.

This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence

the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong. Why is a theory never right? Because we will never know if all the swans are white

the mistake may turn out to be inconsequential. Or

My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans.

With respect to Black Swans, you act to protect yourself from negative ones (or expose yourself to positive ones) even though you may have no evidence that they can take place

setting wealth back by several decades

they make sure that the costs of being wrong are limited (and their probability is not derived from past data).

Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The more remote the event, the less we can get empirical data (assuming generously that the future will resemble the past) and the more we need to rely on theory.

It is exactly like saying that nuclear bombs are safer because they explode less often.

and I wondered whether he might have stayed alive had he gone to New York instead.

Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome

could cause a loss of business

And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Statistically speaking, there's a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.

Luck, however, is too dumb to remain consistent

sometimes you die sometimes you don't.

They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not

They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university?

Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).