Quotes About Probability

The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other words, a billion or more such worlds exist in our galaxy alone. That's a lot of acreage, and it takes industrial-strength credulity to believe it's all bleakly barren.

99.999% of everything you worry about doesn't even come true anyway.

In every operation, there's a risk, and you don't know whether it's gonna... you know, obviously there's that 95% chance, whatever they say, they can never say 100% you're gonna be better. But the concern and the worry is the worst thing.

The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'

Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow.

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

We are not made safe from terrorists by helicopters, or missiles or boots on the ground. Nor is it drones, torture or digital dragnets that protect us. What makes us as individuals safe from a terror attack is the staggering probability that we will be elsewhere when one occurs.

The sprint is sometimes like a toss of a coin. Sometimes it's heads, and sometimes it's tails.

The best we can do is to predict the probability of seeing the electron in any particular location or with any particular velocity.

The right answer, whatever it may turn out to be, will more likely be phrased in terms of wave functions, Schrödinger's equation, and Hilbert spaces.

si realmente podemos esperar toda la eternidad, hasta las cosas más improbables acabarán sucediendo.

Bayes teaches us (1) never to assign perfect certainty to any such belief; (2) always to be prepared to update our credences when new evidence comes along; and (3) how exactly such evidence alters the credences we assign. It's a road map for coming closer and closer to the truth.

In this book, all results from the flipping of coins result from the flipping of actual coins.

It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the computation of odds. Fifty-two cards in a deck. Make it easy. Say it's fifty. Any card has a 2 percent chance of being dealt from a full deck. Keep track of what's out. Adjust the probabilities as the hand progresses.

But Schrödinger said that the cat isn't actually alive or dead unless and until the man outside opens the box to see that the cat is alive or dead." Nico thought that over. "You could listen to hear if it's purring." Frans

For most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet. Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do.

Indeed, even if the permanent secretary was fat, hypertensive or a smoker, he was still less likely to suffer a heart attack at a given age than a thin, non-smoking, low-blood-pressure janitor.

when what felt like a wide distribution of probable outcomes narrows to the inevitable.

What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

But luck is just throwing dice.

people tend to avoid taking risks—they are "risk averse"—when they are deciding among potential gains, potential positive outcomes.

Pascal's Wager says that given the choice, even if the odds for success are slim, it is better for her to take the risk: there is nothing for her to lose and a lot for her to gain.

Sin una matemática sólida, los negocios se convierten en un costoso juego de azar en el que uno apuesta su propio dinero y también el ajeno.