Rare Events Quotes

• The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time — including life — and that doesn't mean it's special.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Real, Mean, Special

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• The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Swans, Ideas, Black

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• In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all. Since then they have occurred more often, and 2008 was the most damaging of them all to date. If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises - like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s - then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.

  Alan M. Taylor

  Country, Past, Different

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

  Aldous Huxley

  Kings, Holiday, Technology

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “Heaven and hell”

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• The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing. For, though in every age there are some who, by bold adventures, or by favorable accidents, rise suddenly to riches, yet it is dangerous to indulge hopes of such rare events; and the bulk of mankind must owe their affluence to small and gradual profits, below which their expense must be resolutely reduced.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Adventure, Men, Age

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• Adamson feels that drug developers are unreasonably concerned about rare events. The reality is children tolerate phase I therapy new agents being tested to find the best dosage and possible side-effects as well as or better than adults, ... Once the initial studies are done that is, phase I trials in adults study should begin in children.

  Peter Adamson

  Children, Reality, Drug

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• The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Real, Tragedy, Asymmetry

  Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

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• In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along [...] there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, "independent" regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections.

  Ilana Mercer

  Independent, Agency, Play

  "Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go Poof". www.wnd.com. January 3, 2014.

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• So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

  Richard Thaler

  Swans, Giving, Black

  Source: bigthink.com

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