Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

Life is a school of probability

Nothing is so unpredictable as a throw of the dice, and yet every man who plays often will at some time or other make a Venus-cast: now and then he indeed will make it twice and even thrice in succession. Are we going to be so feebleminded then as to aver that such a thing happened by the personal intervention of Venus rather than by pure luck?

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.

A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge

You can't predict anything. How can you be certain about anything when everything is chaos and we're not in control?

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

Physics tells us observations can't be predicted absolutely. Rather, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

Very low probability events occur very rarely, but sometimes they do happen.

Every human creative endeavor is subject to mathematical law that you’re not always going to be right all the time.

Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.

There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.