Quotes About Uncertainty

And as a risk taker, only time counts—for I could fool my accountant with steady earnings with a lot of hidden risk, but time will eventually reveal them.

there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event.

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

Even trial and error are a form of barbell.

whatever they are guessing has about a 2 percent chance to fall outside their range.

It is often said that "is wise he who can see things coming." Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

we are simply not wise enough to be trusted with knowledge.

There are some risks we just cannot afford to take. And there are other risks (of the type academics shun) that we cannot afford to not take.

have some element of loss aversion.

it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.2

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

We are gliding into disorder, but not necessarily bad disorder. This implies that we will see more periods of calm and stability, with most problems concentrated into a small number of Black Swans.

Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks.

While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild

that we generally take risks not out of bravado but out of ignorance and blindness to probability!

Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation

who benefited from a market cycle.

Things are not as simple as that. We

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).

but would treat cost of search as "loss.

The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.

Some blindness to the odds or an obsession with their own positive Black Swan is necessary for entrepreneurs to function. The