Quotes About Probability

God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

So little of what could happen does happen.

Simpler theories may be more convenient to work with, but they are not intrinsically more probable than complex ones.

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

Persons who think there is no such thing as luckgood or badare entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it.

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we'd have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they're erratic. People do crazy things that don't make sense.

An atom is a hierarchy of different states of information that define the statistical likelihood of finding a particle here or there at the time of observation.

The odds against there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one, and against two bombs a million times a million to one. Next time you fly, cut the odds and take a bomb.

To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.

Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much.

and it mightn't be

People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist.

a veces las cosas son tan complicadas que es imposible predecir qué va a pasar a continuación, pero en realidad obedecen a unas reglas muy sencillas. Y eso significa que, a veces, una población entera de ranas, o de gusanos, o de gente, puede morir sin razón alguna, sólo porque así es como funcionan los números.

Fischhoff calls this phenomenon creeping determinism -- the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable -- and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.

Investing is 95% luck and 5% skill. And maybe if I'm wrong, it's 98 and 2.

Note that past results do not guarantee future performance. Instead, I am providing you the historical data here to discuss and illustrate the underlying principles.

Investing is 95% luck and 5% skill. And maybe if I'm wrong, it's 98 and 2. TR: Not to insult any active managers!

There's an awful lot of luck relative to skill. Investing is 95% luck and 5% skill. And maybe if I'm wrong, it's 98 and 2.

Note that past performance does not guarantee future results. Instead, I am providing you the historical data here to discuss and illustrate the underlying principles.

There's an awful lot of luck relative to skill. Investing is 95% luck and 5% skill.

It is likely that unlikely things should happen

The poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary...Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

It is a part of probability that many improbabilities will happen.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.