Quotes About Asymmetry

And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates—and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let

The situation is even more lopsided with book sales. If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies. For any large total, the breakdown will be more and more asymmetric. Why

the nonlinearity (that is, the asymmetry, with more upside than downside; asymmetry is a form of nonlinearity).

growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the "tails," that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own

antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (favorable) equals likes volatility.

Median means roughly that 50% of the people die before eight months and 50% survive longer than eight months. But those who survive would live considerably longer, generally going about life just like a regular person and fulfilling the average 73.4 or so years predicted by insurance mortality tables. There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long.

Lembre-se da assimetria fundamental: o antifrágil beneficia-se com a volatilidade e a desordem; o frágil é prejudicado. Bem, tempo e desordem são a mesma coisa.

One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin. The central asymmetry of life is: In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset risks of ruin. Further: Ruin and other changes in condition are different animals. Every single risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. Finally: Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.

those hidden asymmetries that do not immediately come to mind

In other words, I aim at profiting from the rare event, with my asymmetric bets.

Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

Put yourself in situations where favorable consequences are much larger than unfavorable ones.

the power of optionality as an alternative way of doing things, opportunistically, with some large edge coming from asymmetry with large benefits and benign harm. It is a way—the only way—to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.

you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other.

Don't confuse symmetry with balance.

There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work needed to absorb an answer.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.

Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.

My eyes are green, and in one of them there is a splash of brown - apparently it is not a colour, but a freckle! Sometimes I notice that one eyelid droops more than the other.

asymmetric whoop-ass

Ser-se canhoto é circunstância digna de inveja