Quotes About Predictability

All in his life, of what has looked free or random, is discovered to have been under some control. All the time- the same as a fixed roulette wheel.

Hard cases make bad law" is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend.

Our brains much prefer it when we're able to predict the future with accuracy, and so we're inclined to create cultural stories and patterns that allow us to do that. Living happily ever after is one such collective pattern that grants us a sense of predictability and certainty in life and holds the standard for societal harmony.

O]ur existential anxiety originates not from the objective state of reality but from our inflated expectations. The main problem is the discrepancy between our belief that we can handle everything by ourselves and the fact that, as mortals, we have several limitations. Unaware of this, we try to do the impossible: to control the uncontrollable, to predict the unpredictable, to hold on to the impermanent, and to secure the unsecurable. This illusion of omnipotence becomes our torture.

Two-thirds of professionally managed funds are regularly outperformed by a broad capitalization-weighted index fund with equivalent risk, and those that do appear to produce excess returns in one period are not likely to do so in the next. The record of professionals does not suggest that sufficient predictability exists in the stock market to produce exploitable arbitrage opportunities.

It is the definition of the time period for the investment return and the predictability of the returns that often distinguish an investment from a speculation. A speculator buys stocks hoping for a short-term gain over the next days or weeks. An investor buys stocks likely to produce a dependable future stream of cash returns and capital gains when measured over years or decades.

When common sense sees a puzzling phenomenon it looks for a causal agent. When it sees organization it looks for an organizer. This works amazingly well for purposes ranging from the diagnosis of diseases to the creation of governments. But it cannot account for emergence ... the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone.

People can be very motivated to become very control experts because an inability to predict behavior is absolutely intolerable for human beings and every other social animal. The fact that most people act predictably is literally is what holds human societies together.

Monotony is the awful reward of the careful.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.

The last thing people want is a surprise, these days.

People don't want to hang around someone that you don't know how they're going to react to anything you do or say.

I knew it. In this way, Peeta's not hard to predict. While I was wallowing around on the floor of that cellar, thinking only of myself, he was here, thinking of me. Shame isn't a strong enough word for what I feel.

Invest in the known versus the unknown.

Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that "necessity really is the mother of invention.

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

Recall that the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population.

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

that the world is less random than it actually is.

Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.

because these professions are more immune to randomness.

make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm.