Quotes About Uncertainty

or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else.

The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict.

Si veo a una mujer embarazada, el sexo del niño que lleva en su seno es para mí una cuestión puramente aleatoria (un 50% para cada sexo); pero no para el ginecólogo, que podría haber hecho una ecografía. En la práctica, la aleatoriedad es fundamentalmente información incompleta.

the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.

You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.

Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called "efficiency" that makes people now sail too close to the wind.

But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.

Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.

they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.

The world is getting less and less predictable, and we rely more and more on technologies that have errors and interactions that are harder to estimate, let alone predict.

b) The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is unevenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods; 80,000 then 120,000, would be even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.

we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living

I found luck in the most unexpected of places. It is as if there were two planets: the one in which we actually live and the one, considerably more deterministic, on which people are convinced we live.

Bent Flyvbjerg (do capítulo 18) mostrou, em seu Black Swan Management [Gerenciamento do Cisne Negro], a

c) If the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).

Los sucesos que son no repetibles se ignoran antes de que se produzcan, y se sobreestiman después (durante un breve tiempo).

Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

the blindness of hope

Now run the idea in reverse:

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.

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.