Quotes About Uncertainty

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

ignoramus et ignorabimus—we are ignorant and will remain so. Somehow

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

we can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.

In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During

probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism

considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We

complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.

One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker

In the complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.

We are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its

it is not so easy to "falsify," i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections

Mine was the only job you could do if you thought of yourself as risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant.

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

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I

Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least.

we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such

second fallacy lies in failing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We