Quotes About Prediction

In the end, [Sonia] Sotomayor had been in the right place at the right time for the right president. She had the tickets and the people: Princeton, Yale, Morgenthau, Calabresi. Fortified by the dreams of her mother, her personal smarts, and intense determination, Sotomayor had defied predictions from her youth.

So the papyrus fortunes

Sedona was thinking that watching a game when you already knew the final score must be a male thing

If they can prove that I am wrong by that time, I will give it up to their wisdom, but not after to any one's judgment, till I see the end of another year for the Lord will begin with a new century and I will see what he will do, before I will hearken to any man's judgment.

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

Here's a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.

The same thing happened after Donald Trump won the presidency. There was a huge outcry about the polls being wrong. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, drew a lot of that criticism. But he never said Clinton was a sure thing. Based on his aggregation and weighting of polling data, he had Trump between 30% and 40% to win (approximately between two-to-one and three-to-two against) in the week before the election. An event predicted to happen 30% to 40% of the time will happen a lot.

I know viscerally how likely 60–40 and 70–30 favorites are to lose (and, of course, the opposite). When people complained that Nate Silver did his job poorly because he had Clinton favored, I thought, "Those people haven't gotten all their chips in a pot with a pair against a straight draw and lost.

At one such tournament, I told the audience that one player would win 76% of the time and the other would win 24% of the time. I dealt the remaining cards, the last of which turned the 24% hand into the winner. Amid the cheers and groans, someone in the audience called out, "Annie, you were wrong!" In the same spirit that he said it, I explained that I wasn't. "I said that would happen 24% of the time. That's not zero. You got to see part of the 24%!

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. We are constantly deciding among alternative futures:

Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space. When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe that an outcome, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable.

A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens.

In addition to making precise (bull's-eye) estimates, offer a range around that estimate to express your uncertainty. Do this by including a lower and upper bound that communicate the size of your target.

I typically don't get into predicting the success of my projects. I've been involved with a lot of projects that I thought should have really gained notoriety and furthered my career, only to be met with the cold grasp of disappointment. So I typically stay away from predicting how a film will do.

It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.

I have a weird propensity to know what's going to happen in the future.

I love having my cards read - if you go to a proper place, they wouldn't dream of telling you anything awful that is going to happen.

To understand the future properly, it's crucial that we listen to geologists as often as we do computer scientists.

Our actions are preordained by the Fox God's prophecy.

I do believe in prophecy.

Prophecy is what we all have to go by now.

Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

Well, with prophecy you got to see what happens.