Quotes About Surprise

the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.

A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys "with increased statistical confidence.

People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.

For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise.

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.

Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.

we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such

our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

after the event you start predicting the possibility of other outliers happening locally, that is, in the process you were just surprised by, but not elsewhere. After

the wealthiest are to be found among those less suspected to be wealthy.

What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong "improbable" events, as

there is no other way to produce a forecast without being a turkey somewhere, particularly in the complex environment in which we live today.

narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and

we will look at it with respect to resistance to randomness.

Recall that the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population.

when its wording is slightly modified.