Quotes About Prediction

Business more than any other occupation is a continual dealing with the future it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

The greater number of the young women, who envied Anna and had long been weary of hearing her called virtuous, rejoiced at the fulfillment of their predictions, and were only waiting for a decisive turn in public opinion to fall upon her with all the weight of their scorn. They were already making ready their handfuls of mud to fling at her when the right moment arrived.

But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.

Everyone sees that this cannot go on. Everything is strained to such a degree that it will certainly break," said Pierre (as those wha examine the actions of any government have always said since governments began).

Classical mechanics gave us a deterministic view of the world. Quantum mechanics, conversely, gives us a probabilistic view instead. According to Newton, if you know the cause af an event, you can predict the outcome. According to M.Born, you can only predict how likely that outcome will be.

Coming events cast their shadows before.

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

There are no rational means of predicting 'the future of humanity' over a long period or foretelling the nature of 'social formations' in ages to come. The idea that we can make such forecasts 'scientifically', and that without doing so we cannot even understand the past, is inherent in the Marxist theory of 'social formations'; it is one reason why that theory is a fantasy, and also why it is politically effective.

It's called Littlewood's law.

Al Roker was the weather man in New York City, and three years ago we had a blizzard. We were supposed to have, according to Al, 4 to 12 inches of snow. That's his prediction. We had 36 inches. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he was two feet off. THAT'S NOT EVEN IN THE BALLPARK! If you were a roofer and you built a roof and it was two feet off, you'd still be serving time.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

A potentially useful property of forecasts based on cointegration is that when extended some way ahead, the forecasts of the two series will form a constant ratio, as is expected by some asymptotic economic theory.

When it comes to assessing the chances of some complicated combination of events, gut feelings are pretty much useless.

Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.

When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.

In the '20s they were telling us we'd all have our own private plane and take vacations to the moon.

I had my fortune told once at the Great Wall of China. A withered old lady told my fortune - but it was probably one of these things that are set up to rip off tourists. She told me a couple of vague things that came true, but she was probably just lucky. I would never do it again.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

Prophets are dastardly pessimists, to a man.

Nikola Tesla predicted in 1926 that "when wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy