Quotes About Adaptation

Knowing that you cannot predict does not mean that you cannot benefit from unpredictability.

you need a story to replace a story

Trial and error means trying a lot.

mostly cosmetic variations

This point has applications in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and conflict situations. A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict.

We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything Ã¢â'¬Â¦ by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos' entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.

because the interactions are not necessarily linear.

to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself.

We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations.

some idiosyncratic behavior on the part of the individual (deemed at first glance "irrational") may be necessary for efficient functioning at the collective level.

Who is this book written for?

We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

when you leave people alone, they tend to settle for practical reasons.

é uma grande lenda acreditar que o planejamento ajuda as corporações: com efeito, vimos que o mundo é aleatório e imprevisível demais para que uma política seja baseada na visibilidade do futuro. O que sobrevive vem da interação entre alguma aptidão e as condições ambientais.

You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.

reality doesn't care about winning arguments: survival is what matters.

people don't learn so much from their—and other people's—mistakes; rather it is the system that learns by selecting those less prone to a certain class of mistakes and eliminating others.

If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

After things got bad for him, they somehow recovered by some invisible hand, and he was led to believe that it was his intrinsic property to recover from hardships by running every time into a new opportunity. He

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future—but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified.

these careers face a continuous supply of these stressors that make them adjust opportunistically.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. … Mother Nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table … In this book, considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.