Quotes About Probability

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.

In the Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but on how much you believed it to begin with.

When we say that there's a 5% chance that RED is true, we are making a statement not about the global distribution of biased roulette wheels (how could we know?) but rather about our own mental state. Five percent is the degree to which we believe that a roulette wheel we encounter is weighed toward the red.

That's how the Law of Large Numbers works: not by balancing out what's already happened, but by diluting what's already happened with new data, until the past is so proportionally negligible that it can safely be forgotten.

scientists and statisticians have already been worrying about them for quite some time.

probabilities of uncertain events can be mathematically described and manipulated—but are in fact not obvious at all. If they were, they would not have arrived so late in the history of human thought.

When you're trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.

it is probable that improbable things will happen. Granted this, one might argue that what is improbable is probable.

a group of MIT undergrads won millions of dollars by understanding the guts of the Massachusetts state lottery.

Improbability, as described here, is a relative notion, not an absolute one; when we say an outcome is improbable, we are always saying, explicitly or not, that it is improbable under some set of hypotheses we've made about the underlying mechanisms of the world.

Improbability, as described here, is a relative notion, not an absolute one; when we say an outcome is improbable, we are always saying, explicitly or not, that it is improbable under some set of hypotheses we've made about the underling mechanisms of the world.

In the British statistician R. A. Fisher's famous formulation, "the 'one chance in a million' will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.

Revised Sherlock Holmes quote) It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.

Statistics is not an exact science. It is an investigative technique.

anything is possible but probably not that

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Statistisch gezien was op 11 september 2001 om kwart voor negen 's ochtends de kans dat twee vliegtuigen zich in het World Trade Centre zouden boren vrijwel nul.

In a universe, on a continent, in a country, in a state, in a county, on a river, in a small yellow boat,' I said. 'That's what Mary used to say to explain the odds of us meeting. And you have to be born in roughly the same period. Those are the odds. And probably you need to speak the same language.'-- Cobb

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

A lot of boys in my poker circle are mathematicians who play on probability. I don't have that kind of brain, so I rely on instinct. But I recently found out that poker and cards in general go way back in my family gene pool.

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.