Quotes About Prediction

It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amenable to prediction or precision.

In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up 'Armenian Radio' with a question: 'Is it possible', he asks, 'to foretell the future?' Answer: 'Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing'. So

Why did Communism collapse so precipitously in 1989? We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive. Even if Communism was doomed by its inherent absurdities, few predicted the timing and the manner of its going.

The most prolific and accomplished hunters were not the most bloodthirsty and indefatigable. They were the most cool and empathetic. They were the ones who were able to assimilate their quarry's mind-set--to see through the eyes of their prey and thus reliably predict its deft, innate trajectories of evasion.

The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC's argument for ignoring the new medium: "You aren't going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.

The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper," he claimed. "Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure." Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of "interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce" with one word: "baloney.

a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.

My prediction: By 2026, Google's main product will not be search but AI.

Yes. Japan will overrun us," the scholar said. "But we will turn them into Chinese. Give us five hundred years. You wait.

SOMETIMES I THINK we know on some level the person we're going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information.

My logical mind simply can't make sense of the ability to see things before they even happen. However, experience has shown me that there is a lot more to reality than that which is generally considered "logical.

God help him if any of them ever came true. Why, he'd be a two-headed, three-toed, monkey-nosed, blind son of a cesspit-licking lackey is she had her way.

Levi always said if you heard hoofbeats, expect to see horses, not zebras.

In the realm of very small quantities prediction becomes uncertain, if not impossible, because very small quantities no longer behave in accordance with the known natural laws.

Because I carried the war in me, I foresaw it.

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.

Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.

The possibility of predicting something in the future obviously improves our chances of survival, and consequently, evolution has selected the neural structures that allow it. We are the result of this selection. This being between past and future events is central to our mental structure. This, for us, is the flow of time.

The theory also gives information on which value of the spectrum will manifest itself in the next interaction, but only in the form of probabilities. We do not know with certainty where the electron will appear, but we can compute the probability that it will appear here or there.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' We've

hundreds of studies have shown that, compared to predictions based on actuarial data, predictions based on an expert's years of training and personal experience are rarely better than chance. But when an expert is wrong, the centerpiece of his or her professional identity is threatened. Therefore, dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.

Elliot predicted that if people go through a great deal of pain, discomfort, effort, or embarrassment to get something, they will be happier with that "something" than if it came to them easily. For behaviorists, this was a preposterous prediction. Why would people like anything associated with pain? But for Elliot, the answer was obvious: self-justification.

I think we receive a great deal what we expect in this world. -Laura Ingalls Wilder