Quotes About Prediction

Jewish texts known as the Sibylline Oracles.

So now you think the augury was misinterpreted. It said you had to go get someone. It didn't say who that someone was.

For the record, I take no satisfaction in being right. For the record, I pray to God that I'm wrong. I'm not wrong...

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have to ability afterwards to explain why it did not happen. - William Churchill

Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

Los economistas ya han tenido bastantes dificultades para explicar el pasado, así que no hablemos de predecir el futuro.

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

The future is far less knowable than you think.

Smart people love to make smart-sounding predictions, no matter how wrong they may turn out to be.

When asked to name the attributes of someone who is particularly bad at predicting, Tetlock needed just one word. "Dogmatism," he says. That is, an unshakable belief they know something to be true even when they don't.

Tetlock's words, even when their predictions prove.

Parece que forma parte de la condición humana creer en nuestra capacidad de predicción… y también olvidar rápidamente lo malas que resultaron ser nuestras predicciones.

MODERATOR: Tonight, our guest: Thomas Sargent, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the most-cited economists in the world. Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years? SARGENT: No.

But as we've seen lately, such predictions are generally worthless.

Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

fallacy of extrapolation":

The first scientifically grounded forecast appeared in the Times (London) on August 1, 1861, predicting a temperature in London of 62°F, clear skies, and a southwesterly wind. The forecast proved to be accurate—the temperature peaked at 61°F that day—and before long, weather forecasts became a staple of most newspapers, even if they were rarely as accurate as FitzRoy's initial prediction.

What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.

Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention.

Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.")

Laplace's Demon, the hypothetical imp that knows the instantaneous positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, was said to be able to calculate the entire future or past by plugging these values into the equations that express the laws of mechanics and electromagnetism.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.

Though geologists can't yet predict earthquakes, they can often predict volcanic eruptions, and can prepare the people who live along the Rim of Fire and other fault systems to take lifesaving precautions.