Quotes About Unpredictability

Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.

why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?" Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.

Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say

Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.

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

although no single action will have a meaningful effect.

that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

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

these "computable" risks are largely absent from real life!

that the world is less random than it actually is.

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

Always remember that, in a modern environment, wars last longer and kill more people than is typically planned.

we have a tendency to underestimate the role of randomness in human affairs

They don't know what you can do with it, and will live in a state of uncertainty.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

though we play down the role of chance, especially when it comes to our own discoveries.