Quotes About Surprise

show how some degree of unpredictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species.

Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

I came to discuss Black Swans, and I intended to tell them that the only thing I know is that we know precious little about them, but that it was their property to sneak up on us, and that attempts at Platonifying them led to additional misunderstandings. Military people can understand such things, and the idea became recently prevalent in military circles with the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to the known unknown).

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One vicious attribute is that the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

What do they seem to have in common?

what you see is likely to be less Black Swannish than what you do not see.

Remember that for an event to be a Black Swan, it does not just have to be rare, or just wild; it has to be unexpected, has to lie outside our tunnel of possibilities. You must be a sucker for it.

Black Swan is a sucker's problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation

If you are a Stone Age historical thinker called on to predict the future in a comprehensive report for your chief tribal planner, you must project the invention of the wheel or you will miss pretty much all of the action. Now, if you can prophesy the invention of the wheel, you already know what a wheel looks like, and thus you already know how to build a wheel, so you are already on your way. The Black Swan needs to be predicted!

The larger the role of the Black Swan, the harder it will be for us to predict.

He was mad at Henry for not having figured out that these events could happen.

Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did

Los sucesos que son no repetibles se ignoran antes de que se produzcan, y se sobreestiman después (durante un breve tiempo).

Now run the idea in reverse:

there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event.

Why was the change so abrupt?

many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change.

We are gliding into disorder, but not necessarily bad disorder. This implies that we will see more periods of calm and stability, with most problems concentrated into a small number of Black Swans.

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.

the longer these animals can go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.

the drastic changes brought about by unpredictable discoveries