17 quotes
Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)