Quotes About Events

I have always thought that the rapid economic development of South Africa would in the long run prove to be incompatible with the government's racial policies, and recent events have tended to confirm my opinion.

Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action - what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired - as opposed to the human experience of having done those things.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities... space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

No party or event is without a reason. This is how we foster new relationships, open doors, and launch new ideas that create business opportunities, investments, and jobs in the U.S. and Spain.

Such things happen.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.

Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If

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—those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?

And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

after the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work.

This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.

We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We