Quotes About Uncertainty

we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise.

Recall that the Platonic fold is where our representation of reality ceases to apply—but we do not know it.

We" are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable

fragility—which had been lacking a technical definition—could be expressed as what does not like volatility, and that what does not like volatility does not like randomness, uncertainty, disorder

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

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance.

to how deep the author wants to go into a topic

the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

a system that doesn't have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives.

Risk and ruin are different tings.

the drastic changes brought about by unpredictable discoveries

Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.

the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns. Ten days in fifty years. Meanwhile, we are mired in chitchat.

because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable

At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.

So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or the role of such a process, a loop:

The resulting measure of future uncertainty satisfies our ingrained desire to simplify even if that means squeezing into one single number matters that are too rich to be described that way.

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).

People are scared of the alternative.

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied