Quotes About Randomness

the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafés away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silence is far better.

we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible." "Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system." "This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing." "Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

Now run the idea in reverse:

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only in his failure.

My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.

fragility—which had been lacking a technical definition—could be expressed as what does not like volatility, and that what does not like volatility does not like randomness, uncertainty, disorder

otherwise the odds would be too low to get here just by luck.

A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I

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

He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*

Given that it was not predictable, you are not to blame.

with unknown side effects

Ainoa asia, jota onnetar ei säätele, on käyttäytymiseni.

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Realism can be punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. It is difficult to go about life wearing probabilistic glasses, as one starts seeing fools of randomness all around, in a variety of situations—obdurate in their perceptional illusion. To start, it is impossible to read a historian's analysis without questioning the inferences:

randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).

Extremistan, you will have trouble figuring out the average from any sample since it can depend so much on one single observation. The idea is not more difficult than that. In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. This is a very simple test of uncertainty that allows you to distinguish between the two kinds of randomness. Capish?

Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them.

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?