Quotes About Uncertainty

Pero hay otros problemas que surgen de nuestra ceguera ante el Cisne Negro: a) Nos centramos en segmentos preseleccionados de lo visto, y a partir de ahí generalizamos en lo no visto: el error de la confirmación.

so she could read it in the original.

investors are led to overestimate their chances of success.

Extremistan, you will have trouble figuring out the average from any sample since it can depend so much on one single observation. The idea is not more difficult than that. In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. This is a very simple test of uncertainty that allows you to distinguish between the two kinds of randomness. Capish?

George Soros, a complex man who thrived on rare events

Knowing that you cannot predict does not mean that you cannot benefit from unpredictability.

which condition preceded the other.

only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):

In other words, I aim at profiting from the rare event, with my asymmetric bets.

Fat Tony did not believe in predictions.

We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos' entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.

We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do, enough of that little bit to occasionally get into serious trouble.

And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.

We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.

Instead of having medium risk, you have high risk on one side and no risk on the other.

We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good.

the most successful businesses are precisely those that know how to work around inherent unpredictability and even exploit it.

because the interactions are not necessarily linear.

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

should avoid engaging in an action with a big downside if one has no idea of the outcomes.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

do not seem to be taken into account.