Quotes About Prediction

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company, I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved right.'

If history is going to repeat itself I should think we can expect the same thing again.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

One of the things I liked about the movie 'Minority Report' was they used a lot of futurists as consultants to really try to understand what the world really would be like in 50 years.

There was a report that used to come out back in those days, I don't know if it was the Gavin Report or something like that. And they said, no matter what McGuire comes out with next, we're not gonna play it.

I was elected to represent my district, not to predict the future.

In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future.

That idea of being so sure of what has happened, and what will happen, is the most idiotic human thing that anyone can do.

I can't imagine going on when there are no more expectations.

In other words, by finding the anomalous event, what you do is you get out ahead of activities.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

But I would bet that the euro continues to exist and that its importance as a global currency will likely increase.

Our expectation is that by 2050, which is a long time away, India will be the largest economy in the world, overtaking both the U.S. and China.

TAKE THE OUTSIDE VIEW

The critical next step is to stop thinking of black swans the way most people do. They are not bolt-from-the-blue freak accidents that are impossible to understand or prevent. They can be studied. And mitigated.

Uncertainty in estimating viability is related in this way not only to the innate difficulty of predicting the future but also to power and interests.

A light winter means a hard summer.

A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs.

I heartily recommend Alan Watts' little book Instant Weather Forecasting, which taught me how to predict weather changes in minutes.

I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.

Social psychologist Susan Fiske writes,"It is a simple principle: People pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power."11

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Thanks to Blast data, researchers now know that natural walking speed is one of the most accurate predictors of mortality that we have. The slower you walk, statistically speaking, the sooner you are likely to check out.

The things that happen in fiction mirror those things that have happened ---or will happen soon --- in real life.