Quotes About Prediction

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don't—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and commentariat, who dispense opinions free of accountability.

Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the nature of forecasting, he said, "When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Mark my words, Princess," Loki said. "One day, you'll be madly in love with me.

What is known and what is unknown is always relative because what is unexpected depends entirely upon what we expect (desire)-- on what we had previously planned and presumed. The unexpected constantly occurs because it is impossible, in the absence of omniscience, to formulate an entirely accurate model of what actually is happening or of what should happen.

Data is messy, and inference is hard.

Improbability, as described here, is a relative notion, not an absolute one; when we say an outcome is improbable, we are always saying, explicitly or not, that it is improbable under some set of hypotheses we've made about the underlying mechanisms of the world.

En los últimos doce mil años se ha perdido aproximadamente el 50 por 100 de la diversidad global y el desmoronamiento de los ecosistemas tropicales es una realidad predecible para este siglo, en tanto que su recuperación, de acuerdo con los datos expuestos, llevará varios millones de años.

this is more in the category of late-night herb-inspired speculation than actual scientific prediction.

The sacrifice predicted by Malachias cannot be the Sacrifice of the Cross. The prophet employs the word minchah, which means an unbloody food-offering. The Sacrifice of the Cross, though a true sacrifice, was not an unbloody food-offering. The Sacrifice of the Cross was confined to Golgotha and the Jewish people, and hence was not a universal sacrifice in the sense of Malachias,

You have a prophecy hanging over your head like a hawk. You're fire, and only water can destroy you! You can't ignore the signs.

You'll be feeling more than impatience if you keep giving me rubbish tasks like this! he predicted mutinously.

she managed to trip over a half-buried stone and a stray twig before she even reached them. Good luck with taking her anywhere, he thought. Maybe that's what Jayfeather's omen meant.

Only time would tell.

La predicción se mueve en el interior del calendario y del tiempo mensurable; el profeta, en cambio, no se rige por las fechas, sino qu es él quien las instaura.

Che me ne faccio delle girandole dei verbi? Non sono il padrone del tempo, sono il suo asino. Va bene per gli scrittori il passato e il suo ceraunavolta. E il futuro a comodo agli indovini che si arricchiscono coi pronostici. Io conosco le vite che durano un giorno e arrivare a notte è già morire vecchi.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith. We refuse to label the others as one thing or another. We refuse to predict our brother's behavior, our sister's growth.

All the laws of nature are conditional statements which permit a prediction of some future events on the basis of the knowledge of the present, except that some aspects of the present state of the world, in practice the overwhelming majority of the determinants of the present state of the world, are irrelevant from the point of view of the prediction.

It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

The best of seers is he who guesses well.

There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it's really really hard to predict those. I don't believe anyone can.

I can predict things. I can improve the uptime and the reliability. I can intervene and cause a better outcome before there's a problem.