Quotes About Uncertainty

benefits from volatility and variability.

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

cualquier cosa atrapada en la planificación tiende a fracasar, precisamente, a causa de estos atributos: es un mito que la planificación ayude a las grandes empresas porque, como hemos visto, el mundo es demasiado aleatorio e imprevisible para basar una política en la visibilidad del futuro. Lo que sobrevive surge de la interacción entre la adaptabilidad y algunas condiciones del entorno.

that there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement that there is evidence of no possible Black

that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation.

that a casino was precisely the venue not to pick for such a discussion

One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

these "computable" risks are largely absent from real life!

What do they seem to have in common?

that the world is less random than it actually is.

Diversity here has to do with the degree of uncertainty inherent in the process.

The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren't for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn't so when stripped of personal risks.

The gains from size are visible but the risks are hidden

The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one

Randomness, in the end, is just unknowledge. The world is opaque and appearances fool us.

what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see.

Uma das contingências da vida: não existe estabilidade sem volatilidade.

just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.

We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.

because we take what we know a little too seriously.

the total losses for the ten banks would be close to nothing.

Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This "inverse problem" makes narrative disciplines and accounts (such as histories) suspicious.