Quotes About Unpredictability

Look at the implication for the Black Swan. Extremistan can produce Black Swans, and does, since a few occurrences have had huge influences on history. This is the main idea of this book.

This point has applications in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and conflict situations. A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict.

Uncertainty did occasionally pay off there.

that which came with the help of luck could be taken away by luck (and often rapidly and unexpectedly at that). The flipside, which deserves to be considered as well (in fact it is even more of our concern), is that things that come with little help from luck are more resistant to randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.

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

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

Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

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

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

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.

Luck, however, is too dumb to remain consistent

The harder you scrutinize randomness, Faraday declared, the more coincidence seems like a design.

It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate

Anything goes now, apparently," Fiedel told me. "The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Information is that which defies expectation.

Both personal experience and professional studies of social processes, after all, had led me to think that people rarely accomplish exactly what they consciously plan, and constantly find events unrolling differently from what they anticipated. Why, then, do people's descriptions and explanations of social processes overwhelmingly emphasize conscious deliberation?

We want the impossibility set: the benefits of free-flowing capital without the disruptions; the flexibility of floating exchange rates without the unpredictability; and the ability to adapt monetary policy to domestic needs without the headaches caused when other countries do the same.

The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn't accurate, and there's no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that.

I try to mix the characters up and not be second guessed by the audience.

When you're dealing with monkeys, you've got to expect some wrenches.