Quotes About Probability

I tell founders all the time, 99.9 percent chance of failure.

the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. Even

Ahh, but the dice cannot read their own spots.

Probability is always an expression of the human limitation of knowledge and is never some facet of nature.

Determinism in relativistic quantum mechanics is called unitarity. Determinism in all forms of physics is concerned with time evolution.

With a 1:3 ratio, for example, after you win 1 trade, it will take at least 4 losing trades to make you lose overall.

I can't speak for them, of course, but I believe that most economists would accept the view that, while you sometimes can make a score by sheer luck, you can't do it constantly, unless you're willing to put the resources in.

Saying you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's awesome, and it's out of your control, and it's not a career path.

I'd rather win two or three, lose one, win two or three more. I'm a great believer in things evening out. If you win a whole bunch in a row, somewhere along the line you're going to lose some too.

Ultimately you want to optimize championship probability over some window. But if you literally take that to the logical extreme, you would be doing crazy stuff.

This much I'm sure of. Chances for winning = 1 - (# of math students playing)/ (# of math students cheering). That's a fraction.

Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued.

One pair rarely wins an Omaha pot, even if that pair is aces. In Hold'em, on the other hand, a pair of aces is right around the average winning hand.

Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.

I say the one thing about luck is you can't really count on it.

The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known - it's not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.

You could roll the same side over and over again, the laws of the universe intact and unchanging with each turn. It's only when you consider the past that the odds change. That things become less and less likely." -Lane-

If the odds are 50/50, I don't stand a chance!

I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.

Merton ... humbly warned, however, "It's a wrong perception to believe that you can eliminate risk just because you can measure it.

As Fama put it, "Life always has a fat tail.

Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything's conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error.

Taleb likes to invoke Popper: 'No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.