Quotes About Prediction

Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth.

Being the soothsayer of the tribe is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Swag?" "Scientific wild ass guess.

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.' And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window.

Story of our species," Malcolm said, laughing. "Everybody knows it's coming, but not so soon.

But then, things never turn out the way you think they will.

A theory is only valuable if it has the ability to predict future outcomes. But history is the record of human action—and no theory can predict human action.

Story of our species, Malcom said, laughing. Everybody knows it's coming, but not so soon.

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything

Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. Paul Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong in nearly all his major predictions. He was wrong about diminishing resources, he was wrong about the population explosion, and he was wrong that we would lose 50% of all species by the year 2000. His lifelong study of these issues did not prevent him from being wrong.

He talked about the future with such certainty, he might have been talking about the past.

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you're trying to predict the right thing. Most people just do it subconsciously." A

Charlie Ledley—curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley—was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. "The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found" in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan's Cattolica University. —Bloomberg News, November 20, 2008

He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms.

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally

People treated all remote probabilities as if they were possibilities. To create a theory that would predict what people actually did when faced with uncertainty, you had to "weight" the probabilities, in the way that people did, with emotion. Once you did that, you could explain not only why people bought insurance and lottery tickets. You could even explain the Allais paradox.*

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said.

human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it.

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.