Quotes About Prediction

People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

If this goes on . . ." fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved.

Solo resta mencionar una predicción que mi Bombero jefe, Beatty, hizo en 1953, en medio de mi libro. Se refería a la posibilidad de quemar libros sin cerillas ni fuego. Porque no hace falta quemar libros si el mundo empieza a llenarse de gente que no lee, que no aprende, que no sabe.

For fifty years I've watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift.

How satisfying it must feel to simply wait for events to unfold as you have foreseen them, Anakin thought. How powerful to know the outcome before it happened. This was what he could learn—and not from his Master. From Palpatine.

The oldest woman in the village, Paciencia, predicts the weather from the flight of birds: Today it will rain toads, she says, squinting her face into a mystery of wrinkles as she reads the sky - tomorrow, it will be snakes.

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.

A number of people I talked to had predicted it. He was very detail-oriented

Some people skate to the puck. I skate to where the puck is going to be.

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been

I'm convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.

regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.

Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and therefore are biased.

Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels

Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don't want your result to be a negative number.

the prediction of the future is not distinguished from an evaluation of current evidence—prediction matches evaluation. This is perhaps the best evidence we have for the role of substitution.

The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

But we should not expect performance in officer training and in combat to be predictable from behavior on an obstacle field—behavior both on the test and in the real world is determined by many factors that are specific to the particular situation. Remove

A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs—an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.

You inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.