Quotes About Probability

defect corrections have more than a 50 percent chance of being wrong the first time

Quicksort a few times, but what are the odds that your custom version will be fully correct on the first try?

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't. Such are the vagaries of life.

Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.

that number is 58 percent

The future is far less knowable than you think.

La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't.

The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

Los datos no mienten: una prostituta callejera de Chicago tiene más probabilidades de practicar el sexo con un policía que de ser detenida por uno.

Décadas de estudios han demostrado que un niño que nace en un entorno familiar adverso tiene muchas más probabilidades de convertirse en un delincuente.

Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

But if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year, you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently. And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you'll probably panic. So it's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

riesgo = peligro + escándalo.

De modo que es posible que acudir al hospital aumente ligeramente sus probabilidades de sobrevivir si tiene un problema grave, pero aumenta sus probabilidades de morir si no lo tiene.

The governing principle is precisely the same one that predicts behavior at the gas pump. When the price of gasoline is low, people choose to buy more gasoline. When the price of accidents (e.g., the probability of being killed or the expected medical bill) is low, people choose to have more accidents. You

Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.

events that occur at random will seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to space them out.

And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.

the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is.

Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.