Quotes About Probability

If you get rid of emotion for a minute and think about the threat of terrorism statistically, it's not even there. The probability that you will slip on a wet floor in your bathroom and die is a thousand times higher than the probability of you dying as a result of terrorism.

Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

It's true that you can't take an individual rain droplet and say where it's come from or where it's going to end up. But you can say with pretty good certainty whether it will be cloudy tomorrow.

I thought the chances of becoming a Nobel Prize laureate were minuscule because there are so many other innovations and discoveries that happen almost every day.

The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

We don't know the probabilities of future events. Still, you have to take action, and so you do it on gut feeling. That's the world we live in.

The probability I knock out Chael Sonnen is very big. Man, everybody knows his game. He is never going to take me down and I'm going to break his nose with my knee.

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.

Most of us think that we are 'better than average' in most things. We are also 'miscalibrated,' meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn't line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate.

I believe there is true expertise in some endeavors, and not in others. There is obviously no such thing as expertise in predicting the results of coin tosses, but there is expertise in predicting the behavior of lasers.

In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.

Physics tells us observations can't be predicted absolutely. Rather, there's a range of possible observations each with a different probability.

Once you've internalised the concept that you can't prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, chances, and trade-offs. In a world without provable truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding.

That story had at its core a discussion of my fundamental view that nothing in life is certain and that, consequently, all decisions are about probabilities.

Lightning doesn't strike twice.

Strike wondered whether Yasmin had lived in a virtual world of anonymous people for so long that probability and plausibility had fled from her reasoning processes.

Oh no, you do not get any choice in the matter. What you are likely to see is determined by the probabilities for the various quantum states. What you actually see is a matter of random choice. You do not get to choose what will happen; the quantum amplitudes only give the probability of different results, but they do not fix what will happen. That is pure chance and only becomes fixed when an observation is made.

a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable.

That's the way it is with Appian; things that appear ridiculous on average just might have happened, so they cannot be entirely dismissed.

the odds are good, but the goods are odd

The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity. To build a scene, we constantly break open these breaches in reality.