Quotes About Uncertainty

What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they'd ever seen this little man," says McCarthy. "And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone panicked.

In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom….

It's one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. It's another to bet on a form of red and not to know it.

Danny should have been elated: Everything they had thought might happen was now happening. He wasn't elated, however; he was anxious. At 10:30, an hour into trading, every financial stock went into a free fall, whether it deserved to or not. "All this information goes through me," he said. "I'm supposed to know how to transmit information. Prices were moving so quickly I couldn't get a fix. It felt like a black hole. The abyss." It

The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man's game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young.

The options suited the two men's personalities: They never had to be sure of anything. Both were predisposed to feel that people, and by extension markets, were too certain about inherently uncertain things. Both sensed that people, and by extension markets, had difficulty attaching the appropriate probabilities to highly improbable events. Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction of others.

The very first day, we said, 'There's going to come a time when we're going to make a fortune shorting this stuff. It's going to blow up. We just don't know how or when.

Historical Interpretation: Judgment Under Uncertainty," Amos had called it. With a flick of the wrist, he showed a roomful of professional historians just how much of human experience could be reexamined in a fresh, new way, if seen through the lens he had created with Danny.

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.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty," they wrote, "people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic error.

The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds," Danny wrote. "We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.

They were "risk averse." But what was this thing that everyone had been calling "risk aversion?" It amounted to a fee that people paid, willingly, to avoid regret: a regret premium.

We know what the virus will do," she liked to say. "We don't know what the humans will do.

when presented with duplicates of the same ulcer, every doctor had contradicted himself

The draft has never been anything but a fucking crapshoot," Billy had taken to saying, "We take fifty guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you'd go broke.

There is no such thing as a riskless asset. The reason an asset pays a return is that it carries risk.

Six and a half hours later, the market closed. Zoran had no idea whether the market as a whole had finished up or down for the day. Ten minutes after that he could be found, alone, pacing outside the 9/11 memorial, smoking a cigarette. "This is like the first day of the battle against complacency," he said.

If our minds can be misled by our false stereotype of something as measurable as randomness, how much might they be misled by other, vaguer stereotypes?

The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool. "The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can," he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. "It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.

Redelmeier was newly struck by the inability of human beings to judge risks, even when their misjudgment might kill them.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage.

There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.

a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.