Quotes About Variability

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

What's joy to one is a nightmare to the other.

Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.

It's the face the world sees, the one you can change as many times as you want

I change myself a lot. Some roles you don't want to be big, bulky, muscle-y guy and some roles you want to be a lean, marathon-runner physical type. And some roles you just don't want to be in shape.

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope

The nature of war is constant change.

I think that at one moment you're apt for one thing, and at the next moment you're apt for something else.

Sometimes I'm in a bad mood, sometimes I'm in a good mood. It's like everyone else.

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This

In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.

Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it cannot survive stressors) makes it more and more vulnerable to a very severe collapse-as I showed with the Black Swan vulnerability associated with an increase in size.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I

Randomness will be ruled out as a possible factor in the performance

although no single action will have a meaningful effect.

Options like dispersion of outcomes and don't care about the average too much.

This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.

Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence.

The larger the event, the larger the difference.

the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So

that the world is less random than it actually is.