Quotes About Uncertainty

You must make friends, therefore, with what you don't know, instead of what you know.

Her house was built on a foundation of sand. The ice she was skating on was simply too thin. She fell through, into the water below, and is drowning.

When everything has become chaotic and uncertain, all that remains to guide you might be the character you constructed, previously, by aiming up and concentrating on the moment at hand.

The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been. The present is chaotic and indeterminate.

You see, at the end of the day, objections are merely smoke screens for uncertainty for one or all of the Three Tens.

Say something," he said. "What?" I mumbled, struggling to orient myself. "What?" "Can you hear me? What day is it? Who's the president?" "Yes, I don't know, and a horse's ass.

If life's taught me anything, it's that you might as well eat your dessert first, 'cos the ceiling might fall in before you're even done with the salad.

Jordan Castillo Price

if gambling is exciting, you're doing it wrong.

Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying "huh," but rather making a firm assertion: "I'm not sure, this is why I'm not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am." Or even more: "I'm unsure, and you should be too.

When we say that there's a 5% chance that RED is true, we are making a statement not about the global distribution of biased roulette wheels (how could we know?) but rather about our own mental state. Five percent is the degree to which we believe that a roulette wheel we encounter is weighed toward the red.

Data is messy, and inference is hard.

probabilities of uncertain events can be mathematically described and manipulated—but are in fact not obvious at all. If they were, they would not have arrived so late in the history of human thought.

When you're trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.

it is probable that improbable things will happen. Granted this, one might argue that what is improbable is probable.

Improbability, as described here, is a relative notion, not an absolute one; when we say an outcome is improbable, we are always saying, explicitly or not, that it is improbable under some set of hypotheses we've made about the underlying mechanisms of the world.

Risky strategies can be analyzed numerically; uncertain strategies, Ellsberg suggested, were beyond the bounds of formal mathematical analysis

The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been. The present is chaotic and indeterminate. The ground shifts continually around her feet, and ours. Equally, the future, not yet here, changes into something it was not supposed to be.

Or maybe...their biggest fear is that they will get close to you again, and you'll go and drop dead.

Did she want me to kiss her? How weird was this going to be? Should it be like a real kiss, with passion and stuff? Or more of an experimental, pecking kind of deal?

I don't feel brave. I feel like a galloping idiot, stumbling from crisis to crisis, barely able to speak to any normal person

Uno de los problemas de hoy es que los necios y los fanáticos están siempre seguros de sí mismos, mientras que los sabios están llenos de dudas.

S'adonà que anava a les palpentes, entossudit en una recerca estranya, probablement inútil. Però en part havia continuat fent allò per la mateixa raó del començament: no estar quiet, moure's, fer alguna cosa, fugir. Igual que en Raül?

Lo peor de las decisiones es que siempre se deben tomar, como mínimo, dos. Y se tome la que se tome, queda la incertidumbre de qué habría sucedido en el caso de tomar la otra.