It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
(i.e.: don't forget to put, in your utility functions, the damn appropriate weight of those highly-improbable-but-high-negative-impact tragedies!)
It is really the improbability of black swans that we underestimate, not their impact. The tails are fatter than we think.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).