Quotes About Probability

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.

A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability.

What the Second Law indeed states, roughly speaking, is that things are getting more 'random' all the time.

The Keeper of Clouds has unpenned his charges. The Keeper of Winds has unlocked his gates. The Keeper of Waters has opened the sky. The Keeper of Lightnings waves his lances. The Keeper of satellites has observed, 'One hundred percent of probability of precipitation.

I'd never believed in luck. Never had any cause to. Never relied on it, because I never could.

A handgun at two hundred feet is the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.

A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset. No one could explain exactly why, but the phenomenon was easily observed in experiments. Something to do with multiple axes of spin, and wobble, and aerodynamics, and the general difference between theory and practice.

anything. He could end up with seven-to-ten

Realistic. Dispassionate. Overall he figured there was a good chance of success. Either Karel would let it go, or he wouldn't, multiplied by either he was close by, or he wasn't. Two coin tosses in a row. Disaster priced at four to one, success at four to three. Numbers didn't lie. No cognitive bias.

Pascal's Wager.

But the smart money says we should act like I'm right. Just in case." "Like Pascal's Wager.

A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset.

It's always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right, either you bring us back, or you don't, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they're not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true.

In dealing with history, he added, all sorts of things are possible, but not all possible things are equally probable.

Does a person have to suspend their critical judgment in order to believe in something as improbable as miracles?" Craig sat upright in his chair and raised his index finger as if to punctuate his point. "Only if you believe that God does not exist!" he stressed.

The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.

I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.

The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;

Or as the Nobel laureate Max Born wrote, "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality."3

other words, the movement of the dye molecule was virtually impossible to predict before the fact even though it was relatively easy to understand afterward.

This again is a probabilistic process whose future is difficult to predict but whose past is easy to understand.

when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed.