Quotes About Probability

I know that the chances for success are slim. [...] But odds are mathematical formulas calculated to give people a reason not to try.

Life is a school of probability. In the writings of every man of patient practicality, in the midst of whatever other defects, you will find a careful appreciation of the degrees of likelihood; a steady balancing of them one against another; a disinclination to make things too clear, to overlook the debit side of the account in mere contemplation of the enormousness of the credit.

Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

The probability of becoming rich is much greater than of becoming poor.

regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.

Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

La probabilidad de un evento raro será sobrestimada (a menudo, no siempre) debido al sesgo confirmatorio de la memoria. Si pensamos en ese evento, intentaremos hacerlo verdadero en nuestra mente.

Bernoulli observed that most people dislike risk (the chance of receiving the lowest possible outcome), and if they are offered a choice between a gamble and an amount equal to its expected value they will pick the sure thing. In fact a risk-averse decision maker will choose a sure thing that is less than expected value, in effect paying a premium to avoid the uncertainty.

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct.

Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative. These conclusions were well established for choices about gambles and sure things in the domain of money.

Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

This start-up looks as if it could not fail, but the base rate of success in the industry is extremely low. How do we know this case is different?

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

The combination of probability neglect with the social mechanisms of availability cascades inevitably leads to gross exaggeration of minor threats, sometimes with important consequences.

Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball, either in shooting from the field or scoring from the foul line.

In the standard rational model of economics, people take risks because the odds are favorable—they accept some probability of a costly failure because the probability of success is sufficient.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics

The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between

The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.

Betty is much more likely to take her chances, as others do when faced with very bad options. As

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences.