Quotes About Prediction

Sentencing a felon is not a prediction. It is an evaluative judgment that seeks to match the sentence to the severity of the crime.

Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA.

The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed.

They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.

shed new light on the planning fallacy

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.

People in their 30s know where the world is going because they're going to do it. I'm in my 80s so I have no idea.

But just as we tend to treat the details of future events that we do imagine as though they were actually going to happen, we have an equally troubling tendency to treat the details of future events that we don't imagine as though they were not going to happen. In other words, we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention–difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering–and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.

The thing about Laurel and Hardy movies that you can't get from the chopped-up versions on television is how beautiful they are. Things happen exactly at the moment they have to happen. They don't happen a second too soon or too late. You can even predict what's going to happen—and it does happen—and it surprises you anyway. It doesn't surprise you because it happened, but because it happened so perfectly.

Langley estimates that because of global warming, the south of England will one day be among the world's largest producers of premium wine.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an "anticipation machine," and "making future" is the most important thing it does.

Taggin' that name on you, that was like casting a curse on you. Oh, baby, your ma made a sorry, shitty prediction on your whole life and hung a name on you that would help the sorry, shitty stuff come true." "You ain't bringin' me any news.

In November 2004, the last person on the planet who expected Barack Obama to run for president in 2008 was Barack Obama.

I'll be seventy years old soon. Well, Nahum, if you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish State I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish State. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish State, and I would answer: fifty-fifty.

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.

This was a great year for preventive worrying. Seldom in recent history have so many people worried about so many things that didn't happen in the end.

Quiero decir, debería ser imposible, algunas veces no miras con la suficiente atención las cosas que no crees que pasaran o pueden pasar.

mistakes subject to so discerning and public a post?mortem as weather forecasters.

The universe is computing its own destiny.

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

A true Master Player plays as thought the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.