Quotes About Probabilities

people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors.

people's choices are based not on dollar values but on the psychological values of outcomes, their utilities. The psychological value of a gamble is therefore not the weighted average of its possible dollar outcomes; it is the average of the utilities of these outcomes, each weighted by its probability.

the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations.

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probalities.

The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probalities.

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

We think of material realities as facts, but in the quantum world, all possibilities exist simultaneously and then condense into probabilities

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.

L'analyse de toutes ces données a permis de briser certains mythes à propos du recrutement et de faire apparaître une réalité assez étonnante. Les probabilités d'embauche dépendaient-elles des qualifications ? Ou plutôt de l'expérience professionnelle ? Ni l'un ni l'autre ! Seul un élément était décisif : le candidat avait-il l'air sympathique.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think.

Please remember that we deal always with probabilities, not certitudes, and you will not get too flustered as we proceed to the next twist in Quantum Psychology's kinky yellow brick road.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existential/operational probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to invent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damned near all the Religions on the planet, I think.

And does it not appear that virtual selves and virtual realities have infiltrated both psychology and physics because, as this book claims, all sufficiently advanced analysis must eventually abandon Aristotelian certitude and accept models — reality tunnels — based on probabilities?

It turns out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted "human intuition" is in reality "pattern recognition.

It turns out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second.

Quantum theory has reached the point where the source of all matter and energy is a vacuum, a nothingness that contains all the possibilities of everything that has ever existed or could exist. These possibilities then emerge as probabilities before "collapsing" into localized quanta, manifesting as the particles in space and time that

Leadership both projects to the future and reflects upon the past. It bursts with possibilities, flaunts peculiarities, and occasionally defies probabilities.

The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.

It is a mystery to me," he told me, "why we have quantum mechanics when there is only one state of the universe." In other words, why should there be probabilities of alternative conditions of our universes when we inhabit only one condition? And do those other potential conditions actually exist in other universes somewhere?

As Vilenkin said to me, quantum physics can produce a universe without cause—just as quantum physics shows how electrons can change orbits in atoms without cause. There are no definite cause-and-effect relationships in the quantum world, only probabilities

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.

researchers have run experiments25 showing that experts can be trained to be better at estimating probabilities by applying a battery of estimation tests, giving the experts a lot of quick, repetitive, clear feedback along with training in techniques for improving subjective probabilities.