Quotes About Probability

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

Una vieja máxima mía dice que, cuando has eliminado lo imposible, lo que queda, por muy improbable que parezca, tiene que ser la verdad.

Nádja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbably but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nádja's must exist; he had read enough to know this was true.

Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.

For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

Still, I told myself, you really can't make much of one study of one Friday the thirteenth in one town.

Yet although the odds were against me, it wasn't as if I had no chance of succeeding.

The likelihood of my initial hunch being right was too low

There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What's wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that's vastly more probable.

Medicine and public health have transformed the trajectory of our lives. For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

I didn't see much likelihood that an error would be found. Today

Doc Webster's eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes.

In short, we suffer from an "illusion of control" that fools us into thinking the future is more predictable and less uncertain than it really is. Or worse, we believe we can influence chance events through our own actions.3

The chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible

Just as it is impossible to predict with complete accuracy the path of a single electron, so too you cannot know with certainty the future behavior of a single potato. Thus far observations show that man has mashed potatoes millions of times, but it is not inconceivable that one time in a billion the situation could reverse itself, that a potato could mash a man.

Temu, kto szukaj?c przyczyny, nie godzi si? z ?adn? hipotez? rozmys?u, ani w jej postaci opatrzno?ciowej, ani diabelskiej, pozostaje tylko racjonalny surogat demonologii – statystyka.

Eden grew smaller. Beautiful, said the Captain. But, you know, going by the probability curve, there must be others even more beautiful.

Now, ignorant and backward persons will occasionally demand that you show them this configurational space of yours, apparently unaware that electrons, whose existence no one in his right mind would question, also move exclusively in configurational space, their comings and goings fully dependent on curves of probability. Though it is easier not to believe in electrons than in dragons: electrons, at least taken singly, won't try to make a meal of you.

It was a cold-blooded lottery that paid off often enough to be worthwhile adapting for.

There is no such thing as luck. If you think you're lucky and that'll carry you through, you're living on borrowed time.

So Einstein was wrong when he said, God does not play dice. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.

Einstein never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement "God does not play dice.

There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average

God not only plays dice, he also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.