Quotes About Events

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect—our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and

You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.

The larger the event, the larger the difference.

that there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement that there is evidence of no possible Black

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let

Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.

focusing, rather, on the precise and vivid events that easily come to our minds.

Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies.

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

I will only very briefly discuss the crisis of 2008 (which took place after the publication of the book, and which was a lot of things, but not a Black Swan, only the result of fragility in systems built upon ignorance—and denial—of the notion of Black Swan events. You know with near certainty that a plane flown by an incompetent pilot will eventually crash).

There are two categories in which random events fall: Mediocristan and Extremistan. Mediocristan is thin-tailed and affects the individual without correlation to the collective. Extremistan, by definition, affects many people. Hence Extremistan has a systemic effect that Mediocristan doesn't. Multiplicative risks—such as epidemics—are always from Extremistan. They may not be lethal (say, the flu), but they remain from Extremistan.

In other words, history teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. It can teach us a lot outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson. In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical

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

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

is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do things) tend to spontaneously get the point.

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

La tesis central de Popper es que, para predecir los sucesos históricos, es necesario predecir la innovación tecnológica, algo en sí mismo fundamentalmente impredecible.

While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context.

The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.