Quotes About Randomness

The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.

we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.

It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to "fix" things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness.

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

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 fact that you got heads or tails on the previous flip does not change the odds of your getting heads or tails on the next one.

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

our successes depend on randomness).

Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.

Randomness will be ruled out as a possible factor in the performance

The antifragile gains from prediction errors, in the long run. If you follow this idea to its conclusion, then many things that gain from randomness should be dominating the world today—and things that are hurt by it should be gone. Well, this turns out to be the case.

Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

we will look at it with respect to resistance to randomness.

although no single action will have a meaningful effect.

The degree of randomness in such an activity and our ability to isolate the contribution of the individual determine the visibility of the skills content.

By throwing enough words together, some unusual and magical-sounding metaphor is bound to emerge according to the laws of combinatorics.

One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil's Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For

As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided

The same applies to the conventional values of persistence, doggedness and perseverance: necessary, very necessary. One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip to the store caused the winning? Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon

This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.

To my knowledge there are no studies investigating the exact properties of trader's burnout, but a daily exposure to such high degrees of randomness without much control will have physiological effects on humans

In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.