Quotes About Probability

I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.

Look, for some players, pot odds should guide your decision making.

I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And sometimes we don't calculate it correctly; we either overstate it or understate it.

Any film you make is a crap shoot.

You can get lucky in the cups, but you don't get lucky over a 38-game season.

This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

Projects are usually undertaken to either solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. The probability that the project - even if precisely executed - will complete on time, on budget, and on performance is typically small. Project management is utilized to increase this probability. So in a sense, project management is risk management.

Anything is possible, but only a few things actually happen.

Collectivizing risk and considering the community as a whole rather than the individual was a form of "communism," but the practice paradoxically allowed people to maintain their belief in individualism. Probability could compensate for the limits of human knowledge.

But there was one other thing that the grown-ups also knew, and it was this: that however small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

The capacity of a human mind to believe devoutly in what seems to me to be the highly improbable—from table tapping to the superiority of their own children—has never been plumbed. Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it—especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible.

I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data is too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three.

There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. Do you intend to enter this?

Random' and 'chance' are not related. 'Random chance' is a nonsense expression

A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won't be wrong too often.

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the leap of faith and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying leap of faith generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

A note to confirmed pessimists: Prigogine's analysis is based on probability-theory and, hence, is not certain. Thus, if you have found these lyrical pages unduly alarming, take comfort in the thought that, although human success is highly probable, there is still a small chance that we can blow ourselves up or that your favorite apocalyptic scenarios might still occur, despite the general trend toward higher coherence and higher intelligence.

In modern mathematics, information content has a precise numerical value, based on the reverse of the probability that you can predict it in advance. Thus, an astrology column has virtually no information, a great poem has high information, and the ravings of an acute schizophrenic have such enormous information that nobody can predict them or make use of them.

The information in a message equals the negative of the probabilities that you can predict what will come next every step of the way. The easier you can predict a message, the less information the message contains.

Back in 1933 — Lawdee-me, doesn't that seem like the Dark Ages now? — both von Neumann and Korzybski proposed non-Aristotelian logics, as I mentioned many chapters ago. Von Neumann just allowed for a "maybe" (1/2) between true (1) and false (0); Korzybski extended the "maybe" as far as you want — or as far as data allows you to calculate probabilities.

Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard economic or karmic laws guaranteeing them. He recognizes that this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the artist who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of zest for life.