Quotes About Variability

because these professions are more immune to randomness.

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

Such income provides them some insulation from randomness.

or it can be just plain randomness, nothing else.

whatever they are guessing has about a 2 percent chance to fall outside their range.

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

with unknown side effects

Knowing that you cannot predict does not mean that you cannot benefit from unpredictability.

Uncertainty did occasionally pay off there.

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

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. … Mother Nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table … In this book, considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even antifragile.

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

Now, what if you were going to Chicago, where you are told that the weather, while being 60 degrees, will nevertheless vary by about 30 degrees? You would have to pack winter and summer clothes.

Where is the role of optionality in this?

The great variability of all the external differences between the races of man, likewise indicates that they cannot be of much importance; for if important, they would long ago have been either fixed and preserved, or eliminated.

la variabilidad se relaciona generalmente con las condiciones de vida a las que cada especie ha estado expuesta durante varias generaciones sucesivas.

Parece no haber más propósito en la variabilidad de los seres vivientes y en la acción de la selección natural que en la dirección en la sopla el viento.

We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical

Probability tells us that any outlier—an observation that is particularly far from the mean in one direction or the other—is likely to be followed by outcomes that are more consistent with the long-term average.

The standard error is what tells us how much dispersion we can expect in our results from sample to sample, which in this case means poll to poll.

The central limit theorem tells us that a large sample will not typically deviate sharply from its underlying population

All of this will be true no matter what the distribution of the underlying population looks like.

The larger the number of samples, the more closely the distribution will approximate the normal distribution.