Quotes About Uncertainty

I have no problem with risk taking, just please, please, do not call yourself conservative and act superior to other businesses who are not as vulnerable to Black Swans.

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

shows why the convex likes volatility. If you earn more than you lose from fluctuations, you want a lot of fluctuations.

Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it

I find it scandalous that in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it, using tools and methods that exclude rare events. Prediction is firmly institutionalized in our world. We are suckers for those who help us navigate uncertainty, whether the fortune-teller or the "well-published" (dull) academics or civil servants using phony mathematics.

The larger the event, the larger the difference.

Option = asymmetry + rationality

Everything nonstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time.

blinding people to the odds of success when engaging in ventures.

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.

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.

but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before.

he understood optionality mathematically, but not really outside the equation.

much of the opinions and assessments that we have concerning risks may be the simple result of emotions.

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

By all means, demand certainty for the next picnic; but avoid government social-security forecasts for the year 2040.

For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So

I came to discuss Black Swans, and I intended to tell them that the only thing I know is that we know precious little about them, but that it was their property to sneak up on us, and that attempts at Platonifying them led to additional misunderstandings. Military people can understand such things, and the idea became recently prevalent in military circles with the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to the known unknown).

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

They may hate McDonald's, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.