Quotes About Probability

Dan's goal, taken from his mentor Richard Zeckhauser, is to get students to think probabilistically about the world. This means engaging with the challenge of understanding and accepting what 29% means in the context of a Trump victory, and fighting the brain's natural inclination to see things in binary terms.

Dan asks the class whether any of them has ever checked the weather on their phone to see if it's likely to rain while they're outside. Everyone has. "What do you do if you see there's a 30% chance of rain?" "Take an umbrella", several students all say at once.

All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

In our reasonings concerning fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance. A wise man therefore proportions his belief to the evidence.

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence .

Unfortunately, we generally find it difficult to assess very small probabilities. We typically overestimate them (thinking the events more likely than they are) and underestimate very high probabilities.

Events don't actually occur as often as people predict they will. And this in turn is related to hindsight bias (the tendency to see past events as being more predictable than they were at the time), which I'll discuss shortly.

Chaos: when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

It makes sense to predict likely future performance from past performance. Indeed, we often don't have much else to go on. Unfortunately, however, the past can be an uncertain guide to the future.

A dice maker agreed with Scarne: "Once in a blue moon you might find a single store die that classes as a perfect, but the chance of finding two of them in a box of 60 and the chance that they would both be sold to the same purchaser as a pair is so small you can forget about it. It never happened.

If Doc can't let it go, you can always remind him that statistically a human is more likely to die from a hospital error than from a motorcycle ride.

So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere ...

Elias nodded. "You begin to understand the theory of probability," he said. "From the general necessity of the existence of victims, you will find the particular of the villain.

You will act not on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable.

God throws dice, what can I say?

As I have said so many times, God doesn't play dice with the world.

The balance of probabilities, therefore, comes out strongly against the existence of a god.

God does not play dice [with the universe]. [Ger., Gott wurfelt nicht.]

Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of an adult.

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

God's dice always have a lucky roll.

Not only does God play dice with the universe, He's using loaded dice.

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.