Quotes About Uncertainty

Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

Da mesma forma, quando trabalhava como trader, uma profissão repleta de altas doses de aleatoriedade, com contínuos danos psicológicos que perfuram até as profundezas da alma do indivíduo, eu punha em prática o exercício mental de aceitar, todas as manhãs, que a pior coisa possível já havia acontecido

One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even antifragile.

but errors are costlier and delays are considerably longer than in the past.

The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is.

the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

Wouldn't that be stifling?

When we look at risks in Extremistan, we don't look at evidence (evidence comes too late), we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.

Our resources (both cognitive and scientific) are limited, perhaps too limited. Those who distract us increase the risk of Black Swans.

he is far from headquarters and has no idea of his minute-to-minute standing in the firm except through signals.

In the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns.

A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons;

Now, what if you were going to Chicago, where you are told that the weather, while being 60 degrees, will nevertheless vary by about 30 degrees? You would have to pack winter and summer clothes.

We can see that my activity in the market (and other random variables) depends far less on where I think the market or the random variable is going so much as it does on the degree of error I allow around such a confidence level.

This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence

the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.

Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong. Why is a theory never right? Because we will never know if all the swans are white

the mistake may turn out to be inconsequential. Or

mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence

So our mission in life becomes simply "how not to be a turkey

My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans.