Quotes About Uncertainty

There were times when your fear would take directions so wild that you had to stop and watch the spin.

Guthrie esperando y Christine esperando; pero no quizá la misma cosa. Guthrie asustado y Christine asustada; pero no quizá de la misma cosa. Aquí reside, en una palabra, mi preocupación –casi mi ansiedad- por el momento; aquí reside, Diana, ¡el misterio del castillo de Erchany!

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor.

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

Charlie Ledley—curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley—was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, "It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

The world's not just a stage. It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You

Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.

Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don't know

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms.

These folks don't know what they're talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people." (Losses in the pools Hubler's group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.)

Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading," said Amos. "They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.

They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right. The more sure you were of yourself and your judgment, the harder it was to find opportunities premised on the notion that you were, in the end, probably wrong. The

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest).

the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don't.

the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don't. Which brought us to the fifth risk.

Subprime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default. Few

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions.

People treated all remote probabilities as if they were possibilities. To create a theory that would predict what people actually did when faced with uncertainty, you had to "weight" the probabilities, in the way that people did, with emotion. Once you did that, you could explain not only why people bought insurance and lottery tickets. You could even explain the Allais paradox.*