Quotes About Uncertainty

the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

Down there—in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat—things get freaky.

One of the most robust findings, in the academic research and my own, is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn't take than the chances we did.

Change creates fear, and technology creates change. Sadly, most people don't behave very well when they are afraid.

So now what?" I ask. She is quiet for a long time, long enough that I assume she's gone to sleep. "I think this is just part of it," she says. "Civilisations fall. People keep going.

It's hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they're always smarter than you think.

Nobody knows nothing for sure. If they say they do, they're either a preacher or selling something. Deal

I don't know it for sure. Nobody knows nothing for sure. If they say they do, they're either a preacher or selling something.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky said that the problem with making decisions is that we are often making them under conditions of uncertainty.

Ambiguity begets participation.

As with many concepts, "information" has a special and specific meaning to mathematicians and scientists: It is anything that reduces uncertainty. Put another way, information exists wherever a pattern exists, whenever a sequence is not random. The more information, the more structured or patterned the sequence appears to be.

With a lack of jobs and a great deal of uncertainty about participating in contemporary society, however, the adolescent period may in many ways be even further prolonged. Because modern cultural practices do not offer transitional relationships with non-parental adults to help acknowledge and facilitate the adolescent period, we have some major challenges as adolescents in our modern times.

We will honor the controversy, and explore possibilities rather than assert absolutes.

Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.

However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One of the lessons of the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession is that there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.

An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution.

The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence.

our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.