Quotes About Guesses

Indeed, the average guess by people who were asked about Michigan is lower than the guesses of a similar group who were asked about the murder rate in Detroit. Blame for a failure to think of Detroit can be laid on both System 1 and System 2. Whether the city comes to mind when the state is mentioned depends in part on the automatic function of memory.

It is noteworthy, however, that we did not feel we needed information about other teams to make our guesses.

What made Lady Angkatell dangerous, he thought, was the fact that those intuitive, wild guesses of hers might be often right. With a careless (seemingly careless?) word she built up a picture - and if parts of the picture was right, wouldn't you, in spite of yourself, believe in the other half of the picture?...

Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren't worth the stress.

When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.

The reason for this is that every person permits himself the liberty of making guesses in the matter of an obscure subject with more confidence than in one which is clear, and that it is much easier to have some vague notion about any subject, no matter what, than to arrive at the real truth about a single question however simple that may be. But

Can you identify in your own life speculations that became educated guesses and then truth? Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life?

The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses.

The problem is that we view estimates in different ways. Business likes to view estimates as commitments. Developers like to view estimates as guesses. The difference is profound.

And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.

Here's a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.

Clover had heard it said Caul Shivers could see your thoughts with that metal eye. Horseshit, of course. But he'd seen plenty with the other. Few men more. Might be the hardest name in the North still casting a shadow. He didn't need a magic eye to make some sharp guesses.

Curiosity unsatisfied tended to create its own answers. Guesses were often more dangerous than facts.

organisers of weight-guessing competitions and advisers helping people to refine their guesses.

Practical observation commonly consists of collecting a few facts and loading them with guesses.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

Expert: a man who makes three correct guesses consecutively.

They do not realize that knowing history is the only way to make educated guesses about present quandaries

All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures — an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History

Evolution is not truth; it is merely a hypothesis-it is millions of guesses strung together.

Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.