Quotes About Complexity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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?

Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence of Black Swans in the record doesn't mean these were not there.

Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.

or "what are the ten best books

the Black Swan is not just about the occurrence of some event but also about its depth and consequences.)

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.

I do not dispute that arguments should be simplified to their maximum potential; but people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind.

Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.

In other words, it will not be Black Swan driven.

modernity likes the abstract over the particular;

but errors are costlier and delays are considerably longer than in the past.

The more variability you observe in a system, the less Black Swan–prone it is.

Our resources (both cognitive and scientific) are limited, perhaps too limited. Those who distract us increase the risk of Black Swans.

They only knew enough math to be blinded by it.

the world is too random and unpredictable to base a policy on visibility of the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

o sucesso de um escritor, uma empresa, uma ideia, um músico, um atleta, tem de ser planetário, ou equivale a nada. Esses efeitos pioram a previsibilidade, já que hoje quase tudo na vida socioeconômica é dominado por Cisnes Negros. Nossa sofisticação faz com que continuamente coloquemos os carros na frente dos bois, criando coisas que somos cada vez menos capazes de compreender

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.

There are many things without words, matters that we know and can act on but cannot describe directly

Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge

my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically—and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.