Quotes About Prediction

Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn't so.

If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.

No program can say what another will do. Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, You cannot tell if computation will stop.

Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers.

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying

It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it.

You might define vision as foresight with insight based on hindsight.

If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.,

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Almost every cost estimate made by a physicist is wildly wrong, and the better the physicist the worse it is (Herb York).

In short, it was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men's lives, as can be seen in Table 2.3.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.

That idiot couldn't find his way out of a boot with floodlights and scout support. Trust me, victory is not in his future.

Knowing too much about the future made things more complicated, not less.

Coloro che dicono che il mondo andrà sempre così come è andato finora contribuiscono a far sì che l'oggetto della loro predizione si avveri

Stalin scribbled on an intelligence report predicting that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union in June 1941: 'You can send your source to his f*cking mother. This is disinformation.

Coming events do cast shadows.

How much harm, eddying outward in fateful circles, Clement was beginning to foresee.

Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.

Since emotions are few and reasons many, the behavior or a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. And that, in turn, means that if laws are to be developed that enable the current of history to be predicted, then one must deal with large populations, the larger the better. That might itself be the First Law of Psychohistory, the key to the study of Humanics. Yet.' R. Giskard Reventlov