Quotes About Future

When asked to imagine the future, we have the tendency to take the present as a baseline

When we think of tomorrow, we just project it as another yesterday.

The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.

By all means, demand certainty for the next picnic; but avoid government social-security forecasts for the year 2040.

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.

Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don't move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones).

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like.

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.

The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise. The modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy wrote a piece in 1915 after Philostratus' adage "For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen.

law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If

On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future

in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable

The resulting measure of future uncertainty satisfies our ingrained desire to simplify even if that means squeezing into one single number matters that are too rich to be described that way.

If people were rational, their rationality would cause them to figure patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future.

Next let me show how the future is mostly in the past.

There is actually a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

he who does not have a past has no future.6

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself.

Retirees get less upside than downside.