Quotes About Uncertainty

If one has no steady belief and foundation to one's life, it is all hopelessness and tears,

Je m'inquiète : comment savoir si on a attrapé un désespoir, puisqu'on ne peut même pas le voir ?

Fürchterliche Ungewissheit? Fürchterlich nur so lange, als wir ihr nicht ins Auge zu blicken vermögen.

What was I waiting for? For signs and miracles, stars on the firmament..?

When you are young and healthy, it never occurs to you that in a single second your whole life could change.

Ja, liebe Klara: Es ist sehr, sehr gefährlich, auch nur einen Tag zu leben.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of "I'm not sure.

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that's okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don't perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try.

Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn't a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.

The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann's definition of "real games." They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception, prominent elements in poker. Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.

When someone asks you about a coin they flipped four times, there is a correct answer: "I'm not sure.

Identifying a negative outcome doesn't have the same personal sting if you turn it into a positive by finding things to learn from it. You don't have to be on the defensive side of every negative outcome because you can recognize, in addition to things you can improve, things you did well and things outside your control. You realize that not knowing is okay.

Forcing ourselves to express how sure we are of our beliefs brings to plain sight the probabilistic nature of those beliefs, that what we believe is almost never 100% or 0% accurate but, rather, somewhere in between.

There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, "I'm not sure" is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can't be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking.

Making better decisions starts with understanding this: uncertainty can work a lot of mischief.

When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can't know for sure whether you can succeed at what you're doing because that's probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice—the choice to persevere—lets you eventually find out the answer.

Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits. By expressing our level of confidence in what we believe, we are shifting our approach to how we view the world. Acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in measuring and narrowing it. Incorporating uncertainty in the way we think about what we believe creates open-mindedness, moving us closer to a more objective stance toward information that disagrees with us.

Here's a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.

The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn't determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.

We process outcomes sequentially, treating each outcome as if it stands alone. We don't sit back and wait to update our beliefs until we have enough data to overcome the uncertain relationship between outcomes and decisions.