Monday, May 28, 2012

Nassim Taleb quotes (the unexpected and the "unknown unknown")

“Plans fail because of what we have called tunneling, the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself…..The unexpected almost always pushes in a single direction: higher costs and a longer time to completion. On very rare occasions, as with the Empire State Building, you get the opposite: shorter completion and lower costs—these occasions are becoming truly exceptional nowadays…..As I said earlier, we are too narrow-minded a species to consider the possibility of events straying from our mental projections, but furthermore, we are too focused on matters internal to the project to take into account external uncertainty, the “unknown unknown,” so to speak, the contents of the unread books.” –Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan