Quotes About Uncertainty

Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness.

It qualified as a Black Swan, but I did not know the expression then.

Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.

The future ain't what it used to be," Berra

The hidden risk transfer is not limited to bankers and corporations.

To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best.

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.

By betting against fragility, they were antifragile.

Cualquier reducción del mundo que nos rodea puede tener unas consecuencias explosivas, ya que descarta algunas fuentes de incertidumbre, y nos empuja a malinterpretar el tejido del mundo.

I would be now brainwashed into thinking that uncertainty was something to be found in a casino

He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*

The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models

Mi idea es que algunos resultados científicos no sólo son inútiles en la vida real, porque infravaloran el impacto de lo altamente improbable (o nos llevan a ignorarlo), sino que es posible que algunos de ellos estén creando en realidad Cisnes Negros.

in the event of its going down, it could go down a lot. Suddenly

Whenever your survival is in play, don't immediately look for causes and effects.

Given that it was not predictable, you are not to blame.

with unknown side effects

the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).

la acción del Cisne Negro se sitúa en Extremistán, no es más que una mera aproximación; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos más de lo que sea necesario.

90 percent of all options expire as losses.

In the end this is a trivial decision making rule: I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans -- when a failure would be of small moment -- and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. I am very aggressive when an error in a model can benefit me, and paranoid when an error can hurt.

Look at the implication for the Black Swan. Extremistan can produce Black Swans, and does, since a few occurrences have had huge influences on history. This is the main idea of this book.