Quotes About Prediction

This prophecy has turned out entirely and miserably wrong.

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing and clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread and exterminated whole nations; and in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

Is not happening yet, contributes Boris. Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened.

The belief otherwise is sometimes called "the gambler's fallacy." In fact, if you flip a fair coin 1,000,000 times and get 1,000,000 heads in a row, the probability of getting tails on the next flip is still ½. The

Probability tells us that any outlier—an observation that is particularly far from the mean in one direction or the other—is likely to be followed by outcomes that are more consistent with the long-term average.

On the other hand, the most likely outcome, meaning the one that will happen most often, is that the company will not discover a cure for baldness and you will get only $250,000 back.

First of all, our best guess for what the mean of any sample will be is the mean of the population from which it's drawn.

Second, even if the underlying data could accurately predict future risk, the 99 percent assurance offered by the VaR model was dangerously useless, because it's the 1 percent that is going to really mess you up.

Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.

You are lost the moment you know what the result will be.

Before the first year, nobody gave it a chance. Now, 36 years later, everybody knows Monday Night Football.

When I went into the Montreal Games, nobody expected much out of me.

At some point, Moore's law will break down.

and their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound prediction; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.

Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, "If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps."68

On the contrary," Thrawn corrected coolly. "Not only will they fall for it, they'll be utterly destroyed by it. Watch, Captain. And learn.

Ryan asked, "Is there any economist in the world who correlates Russia's increased authoritarianism with their increased economic growth?" Helen Glass thought for a moment. "Sure, you can find some who will say just that, but remember, there were economists predicting the fall of capitalism and the rise of world communism, even in the eighties." Jack laughed. "Good point. You can always find an expert to confirm your belief, no matter how ridiculous.

anyone who knew anything about military science could have seen it coming, because the tiny nation of Estonia had focused on diplomacy, not on its physical defense. Edgar Nõlvak had seen it coming, not because he was a soldier or a politician—he was a schoolteacher—but he had seen it coming because he watched television.

And so they couldn't have known exactly how despicable a lie it was when the president told the news media later that week that nobody could have predicted the levee breaks.

Why procrastinate when you can precognitate?

Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course.

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.