Quotes About Probability

Fate laughs at probabilities.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

simple probability and statistics should be taught in grades kindergarten through twelve and that analyzing games of chance such as coin matching, dice, and roulette is one way we can learn enough to think through such issues.

Mathematically, interruptions didn't matter, because my lifetime of playing was just one long series of hands, and chopping it into sessions and playing them at various times and in various casinos should not affect my edge, nor the long-run amount I could expect to win. This principle applies in both gambling and investing.

They also adopted a notion we rejected, called VaR or "value at risk," where they estimated the damage to their portfolio for, say, the worst events among the most likely 95 percent of future outcomes, neglecting the extreme 5 percent "tails," then acted to reduce any unacceptably large risks. The defect of VaR alone is that it doesn't fully account for the worst 5 percent of expected cases. But these extreme events are where ruin is to be found.

For the second time, the Ten-Count System had shown moderately heavy losses mixed with "lucky" streaks of the most dazzling brilliance. I learned later that this was a characteristic of a random series of favorable bets. And I would see it again and again in real life in both the gambling and the investment worlds.

But I realized that the odds as the game progressed actually depended on which cards were still left in the deck and that the edge would shift as play continued, sometimes favoring the casino and sometimes the player.

I decided to begin by finding the best strategy to use when I knew which cards had already been played.

In counting cards, it's mainly the fraction remaining that matters, not the number.

probability calculations needed to figure out gambling games or to solve problems in everyday life. We didn't need that skill to survive as a species in the forests and jungles.

The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

A stochastic process is about the results of convolving probabilities-which is just what management is about, as well.

It is the concept of likelihood that a real understanding of probability resides, and we must learn how to measure it.

If you had an equation detailing the probability of something emerging from a vacuum, you would still have to ask why that equation applies. Hawking had, in fact, noted the need for a creative factor to breathe fire into the equations.

Virtually no major scientist today claims that the fine tuning was purely a result of chance factors at work in a single universe.

There is not much difference between an economist and a palmist because of the similarity of the success ratio of the predictions of both.

As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, "Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information." And even when the information is not false, the problem is "that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.

We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.

I think if our students, if our high school students — if all of the American citizens — knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck.

I always think about taking 10 random people off the street and trying to pair them. Probably a lot of them are not going to work out, but randomly one might. That's basically what they're doing on 'The Bachelorette.' Here's 25 guys, see if you like one of them and it might work out.

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.