Quotes About Uncertainty

But nothing surprises me now. I've grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight.

I'd been alone for so long that I started talking to the radio. At least I assumed that's where the voices were coming from. In the country that produced Luther, Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler, you can never be absolutely sure about these things.

Hmm. That's what I suspected, you mad bastard.

wondering if I should

Business, investor, and consumer confidence is shaken and the contraction phase begins.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.

Caught in the center of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. I make a sharp reply, Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain Just in what jaws you were to suppurate: You may have thought things would come right again If you could only keep quite still and wait.

Most things are never meant. - Going, Going

ran on blindly into the blind dark.

What's your plan?" "There isn't one," said Hester. "I'm just making it up as I go along.

In the materialist conception, mind is the agent of the body; in the Freudian conception, as it gradually emerged through these early years of uncertainty, the body exists as a symptom of mental demands.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously," Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."17

It's a rare day when a journalist says, "The market rose today for any one of a hundred different reasons, or a mix of them, so no one knows.

if you have the time to think before making a big decision, do so—and be prepared to accept that what seems obviously true now may turn out to be false later.

produce forecast-wrecking

The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction, and that is enough. Many have become wealthy peddling forecasting of untested value to corporate executives, government officials, and ordinary people who would never think of swallowing medicine of unknown efficacy and safety but who routinely pay for forecasts that are as dubious as elixirs sold from the back of a wagon.

The explanatory urge is mostly a good thing. Indeed, it is the propulsive force behind all human efforts to comprehend reality. The problem is that we move too fast from confusion and uncertainty ("I have no idea why my hand is pointed at a picture of a shovel") to a clear and confident conclusion ("Oh, that's simple") without spending any time in between ("This is one possible explanation but there are others").

The politicians would be blind men arguing over the colors of the rainbow. If the government had subjected its policy "to a randomized controlled trial then we might, by now, have known its true worth and be some way ahead in our thinking," Cochrane observed.

Unpredictability and predictability coexist uneasily in the intricately interlocking systems that make up our bodies, our societies, and the cosmos. How predictable something is depends on what we are trying to predict, how far into the future, and under what circumstances.

Laws of physics aside, there are no universal constants, so separating the predictable from the unpredictable is difficult work. There's no way around it.

Call me an "optimistic skeptic.

WE ARE ALL forecasters. When we think about changing jobs, getting married, buying a home, making an investment, launching a product, or retiring, we decide based on how we expect the future will unfold. These expectations are forecasts. Often we do our own forecasting.