Quotes About Uncertainty

With respect to Black Swans, you act to protect yourself from negative ones (or expose yourself to positive ones) even though you may have no evidence that they can take place

Where is the role of optionality in this?

the feeling of false stability.

But possible future deviations from the course of the past are infinite.

setting wealth back by several decades

The forecasters' errors were significantly larger than the average difference between individual forecasts, which indicates herding. Normally, forecasts should be as far from one another as they are from the predicted number.

they make sure that the costs of being wrong are limited (and their probability is not derived from past data).

Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge

my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But

This is called a stop loss, a predetermined exit point, a protection from the black swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The more remote the event, the less we can get empirical data (assuming generously that the future will resemble the past) and the more we need to rely on theory.

It is exactly like saying that nuclear bombs are safer because they explode less often.

absence of fluctuations in the market causes hidden risks to accumulate with impunity. The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs.

the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.

would not have been strongly drawn to such pursuits anyway.

and I wondered whether he might have stayed alive had he gone to New York instead.

Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome

could cause a loss of business

Whenever I see that kind of story, where everybody agrees, I know there's something wrong.

Most of us lead or are led by lives of patterned regularity. Diurnally, surprises are relatively few. And except for economic or physical uncertainties, we neither face nor court significant degrees of risk because a fundamental drive in the vast majority of us is toward the attainment of as much security as is possible. In this sense, jazzmen, of all musicians, are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

Vivevano così, in stretta amicizia, dividendosi il poco che avevano, e senza appoggiarsi a nessun gruppo, senza fare progetti per il futuro, perché non c'era nessun futuro possibile; probabilmente sarebbe scoppiata la guerra, e l'avrebbero vinta gli stupidi; perché gli stupidi, Mario diceva, vincevano sempre.

And no one knew what was in store for the dead, he said, perhaps nothing at all but perhaps, on the other hand, there was something, probably a great boredom, he said, a deathly boredom.

I can't figure out if I like him. He's polite. It's the kind of politeness that makes you feel full, as if you've eaten too much jam