Quotes About Probability

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

Perhaps the most serious objection is what Tetlock calls the "wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy," the risk of being charged with "failure" when an event doesn't happen even when the intelligence estimate claimed there was only a 70 percent chance that it would. When it comes to likelihood, we tend to conflate maybe with sure thing.87

The difference between "significant" and "not significant" is not itself statistically significant

Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you're unlucky. It all weighs out at the end. That is my experience at least.

When I say that I want to win Roland-Garros, it's hard because I have practically as many chances of winning at EuroMillions. You have to beat Rafa who has never really lost at Roland Garros and whom I have never beaten on clay.

When I worry about risks, I worry about the biggest ones, particularly those that are difficult to predict - the ones I call small but deep holes. While odds are you will avoid them, if you do fall in one, it's a long way down and nearly impossible to claw your way out.

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

As much as I think the sports world loves to try to predict everything, there are still some parts of it that can't be predicted.

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

I actually think the chances that we'll find E.T. are pretty good.

People are used to dealing with risk.

I think wickets just depend on how lucky you are at the time.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.

When you're picking a basketball team, you'll take the brother over the guy with the yarmulke. Why? Because you're playing the odds.

We are on a rock travelling around 1 of 100 billion stars. Our species is 1 of over half a billion that have ever existed. Our chances of being born are about 1 in 400 trillion. You're not special, but you are fucking lucky. Enjoy your amazing life. You'll never exist again.

While it would be absurd to doubt the reality of the external world, it would be mistaken to claim that we can have any certain knowledge of it. The study of the external world can never claim certainty, only a degree (often a very high degree) of probability.

To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.

what is more accessible in mind becomes more probable in action,

Do not mistake probability for truth, for it is a notorious liar.

People usually lived or died of dumb luck. Not because something mystical cares.

An estimate is not a number. An estimate is a distribution.

When presented with this evidence, believers in the "hot hand" are likely to reject it because they "know better" from experience.

Ich stellte mir seine Gedanken als einen schnellen, schmalen Wasserstrom vor, der sich durch die Fugen eines gefliesten Bodens bewegte - erst vorwärts, dann nach links und rechts ausgreifend, an einem Punkt kurz innehaltend, in eine andere Richtung weiter vorstoßend, sich immer weiter ausbreitend und verzweigend und dabei in seiner schimmernden, flüssigen Bewegung all die kleinen Möglichkeiten, Kosequenzen und Wahrscheinlichkeiten bedenkend.

I've seen men die because they were sure that what should not happen,would not. -Robert Jordan(The eye of the world,Wheel of time)