Quotes About Prediction

Not many people give you a vision of what the future will bring.

As it was, getting out of the car that night Coolidge said to Jager: "It's wonderful to ride in a horseless wagon." Then a pause: "But it won't amount to much!

It is, of course, quite impossible to make forecasts about the future except on the hypothetical postulate that in all matters where the nature of changes cannot be definitely foreseen and taken into account, the future is assumed to be a continuance of the past.

The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

They succumb to the egotistical delusion that they can predict the future, instead of recognizing the limits of their knowledge. And they leap blindly into manias, their judgment fogged by "return envy" and the fear of missing out.

I'm amused when financial planners and academics talk about methods that predict a 40-year success rate of, say, 95%. If you think about it, this implies that our political and financial institutions will remain intact for about the next millenium (40 years divided by a failure rate of 5% equals 800 years). Considering the history of human civilization, this is a pretty heroic assumption.

We tend to extrapolate the recent past indefinitely into the future; in the 1970s, investors thought that inflation would never end, whereas now most people think it will never occur again. The first viewpoint was proven wrong within a few years, and the latter viewpoint most likely will be soon.

One of the most important skills in my profession is prognosis, the prediction of what will happen to a patient going forward.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.

The future is even more fungible than the past: We can make it up, assert it will be so, and no one can say it won't happen with any surety. Herman Melville, in talking about history, said that the past is the textbook of tyrants, while the future is the bible of the free.

The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.

Beware the difference between prediction and prophecy. Prophecy purports to know things which cannot be known.

What if you'd rather not know? You may not like these predictions. Your friends and colleagues may ridicule them. You may try to modify the explanation so that it will not make them, without spoiling its agreement with observations and with other ideas for which you have no good alternatives. You will fail. That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. In fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another. Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

For example, you cannot predict what numbers will come up on a fair (i.e. unbiased) roulette wheel. But if you understand what it is in the wheel's design and operation that makes it fair, then you can explain why predicting the numbers is impossible.

Prediction – even perfect, universal prediction – is simply no substitute for explanation.

I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.

The brain has conflicting goals: to provide you with information, and to reduce your anxiety about the worrying outcome. If you wanted Clinton to win in 2016, your brain achieved both goals by accepting the 30% figure but telling you it would not happen.

Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen.

It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen.

In 1929, as a young man, British biologist J. D. Bernal wrote a book entitled "The World, The Flesh and the Devil" that Arthur C. Clarke called, "the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made.

work, Jacob was not claiming to make a detailed and correct prediction of climate changes over the next several hundred thousand years, only to determine whether our influence could be strong enough to interrupt the Milankovi? oscillations over the coming millennia. His first model results suggest that the answer is yes.