Quotes About Uncertainty

The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them—and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence.

Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the "normal," particularly with "bell curve" methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.

This high-yield market resembles a nap on a railway track.

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.

So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

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

It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.

our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This

This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the normal, particularly with bell curve methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

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

There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.

In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.