Quotes About Uncertainty

while the bulk of their risks came from outside their models.

without penalty to themselves from having been wrong in the first paper

the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for.

So the reader can imagine my state of mind when

True, our knowledge does grow, but it is threatened by greater increases in confidence, which make our increase in knowledge at the same time an increase in confusion, ignorance, and conceit.

Black Swan is a sucker's problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation

because these professions are more immune to randomness.

While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%).

even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like.

they may never become noticeable.

we have a tendency to underestimate the role of randomness in human affairs

the second lesson is more aggressive: you can actually take advantage of the problem of prediction and epistemic arrogance!

I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obtained by multiplying the probabilities by the corresponding outcomes).

They don't know what you can do with it, and will live in a state of uncertainty.

If you are a Stone Age historical thinker called on to predict the future in a comprehensive report for your chief tribal planner, you must project the invention of the wheel or you will miss pretty much all of the action. Now, if you can prophesy the invention of the wheel, you already know what a wheel looks like, and thus you already know how to build a wheel, so you are already on your way. The Black Swan needs to be predicted!

Beware of precise plans by government. Let government predict: it makes them feel better about themselves and justifies their existence.

we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right

Such income provides them some insulation from randomness.

Political and economic "tail events" are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.

This dovetails into the "barbell" strategy of taking maximum exposure to the positive Black Swans while remaining paranoid about the negative ones.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.

time is equivalent to disorder, and resistance to the ravages of time, that is, what we gloriously call survival, is the ability to handle disorder.