Quotes About Surprise

because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable

It qualified as a Black Swan, but I did not know the expression then.

He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*

randomness, in practice, is what we don't know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).

she may have been happier before the Black Swan of her success than after.

Contrary to what people might expect, I am not recommending that

do not try to predict precise Black Swans—it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later turn out to be breakthroughs.

exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it

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?

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.

Los Cisnes Negros que imaginamos, de los que hablamos y nos preocupamos no se parecen a los que previsiblemente son Cisnes Negros. Como veremos a continuación, nos preocupamos de los sucesos «improbables» equivocados.

I was pleasantly surprised by what turned out to be the best lunch I ever had in my entire life.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

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

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

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

Another way to see the beastly aspect of schedules and rigid projections is to think in limit situations. Would you like to know with great precision the date of your death? Would you like to know who committed the crime before the beginning of the movie? Actually, wouldn't it be better if the length of movies were kept a secret?

My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans.

Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge

Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.

So she was unprepared for the homely little house beside the pond, unprepared for the gentle eddies of dust, the silver cobwebs, the mouse who lived—and welcome to him!—in a table drawer.

Strange that she'd never known she had such cruelty inside.

Cormac was completely aware that he was being manipulated, but how he could not see. He reckoned that when he did find out, the surprise would be a nasty one. That was how it usually went.