Quotes About Uncertainty

Predictions about complex systems, in other words, are highly subject to the law of diminishing returns: The first pieces of information help a lot, but very quickly you exhaust whatever potential for improvement exists.

Common sense, in other words, is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.

The real problem of prediction, in other words, is not that we are universally good or bad at it, but rather that we are bad at distinguishing predictions that we can make reliably from those that we can't.

Complex systems are not really random in the same way that a coin toss is random, but in practice it's extremely difficult to tell the difference.

If the answer isn't clear to you, you're not alone—even mathematicians argue about what it means to assign a probability to a single event.

black swan event like the storming of the Bastille, in other words, the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

I don't know why I do stuff sometimes. Sometimes I go by the numbers. Sometimes I go on what I feel. Sometimes I go on what I hope.

When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.

Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon afterward they are certain to go wrong. It's just the way things are meant to be.

What if I told you that 10 years from now, your life would be exactly the same? I doubt you would be happy. So, why are you so afraid of change?

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

I can't live my life worrying about something that might never happen.

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?

However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.

The beauty of life is not knowing.

And I'm scared. I'm scared for my life.

It's a strange life... you really don't know how you will impact people or how things will play out.

When you live a life without questions, you're unprepared for the questions when they come.

No one knows what is going to happen in the next few minutes, and yet people still go forward, because they have trust, because they have faith.

There is an ambush everywhere from the army of accidents; therefore the rider of life runs with loosened reins.