Quotes About Uncertainty

volatility benefits managers since they only get one side of the payoffs.

We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations.

or mistaking a profitable bet for good forecasting—not convexity of payoff and optionality).

Who is this book written for?

those who cannot learn from experience, or don't mind taking risks they don't understand, may kill many.

Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.

the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Retirees get less upside than downside.

do not try to predict precise Black Swans—it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

The hidden harm of fragility is that you need to be much, much better than random in your prediction and knowing where you are going, just to offset the negative effect.

Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them.

The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform.

é uma grande lenda acreditar que o planejamento ajuda as corporações: com efeito, vimos que o mundo é aleatório e imprevisível demais para que uma política seja baseada na visibilidade do futuro. O que sobrevive vem da interação entre alguma aptidão e as condições ambientais.

The rarer the event, the less tractable, and the less we know about how frequent its occurrence—yet the rarer the event, the more confident these "scientists" involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with equations in multicolor background have become.

exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it

You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.

One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.fn3

that which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.

O tempo é o melhor teste de fragilidade — abrange volumosas doses de desordem

and I should base my decisions around that.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?