Quotes About Uncertainty

It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them—even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing.

but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.

Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again;

our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives

Problema noastr? nu este numai c? nu cunoa?tem viitorul, ci ?i c? nu cunoa?tem nici trecutul.

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them. As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.

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—those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I

When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.

Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't have a name for.

If you engage in a Black Swan–dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know.

Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

These traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. I call them crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them.

It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How

don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on

is often a good career move for an author.

Ex cura theoria nascitur.

reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many

We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the "I don't know." Why