Quotes About Chance

W]ithout the chance presence of the Athenian stranger in Crete there would be no prospect of wise legislation for the new city. This makes us understand the stranger's assertion that not human beings but chance legislates: most laws are as it were dictated by calamities.

i didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through

true randomness sometimes produces repetition

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.

The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.

Or as the Nobel laureate Max Born wrote, "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality."3

This again is a probabilistic process whose future is difficult to predict but whose past is easy to understand.

when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed.

Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.

Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child's third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.

the same mathematics that describes drawing pebbles from an urn can be employed to describe any series of trials in which each trial has two possible outcomes, as long as those outcomes are random and the trials are independent of each other.

regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy.

We cannot know whether our single observation represents the mean or an outlier, an event to bet on or a rare happening that is not likely to be reproduced.

As a result, determinism is a poor model for the human experience. Or as the Nobel laureate Max Born wrote, "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality.

What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.

According to the laws of chance, if you look around enough, you are bound to find something interesting.

complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents.8

A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his "accomplishment," he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. "I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights," he said, "and 7 times 7 is 48.

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation.

So the relevant question is, if thousands of people are tossing coins once a year and have been doing so for decades, what are the chances that one of them, for some fifteen-year period, will toss all heads?