Quotes About Probability

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

Blackjack is very scientific. There's always a right answer and a wrong answer. Do you take a card, increase your bet, bet big or bet small. There's absolutely a right and wrong answer.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

If public opinion were determined by a throw of the dice, it would in the long run be half the time right.

The probability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melting in the next two hundred years is 1 in 20. If this happens, all the world's coastal cities will be drowned, from New York to London to Sydney.

I certainly can't see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete scepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable.

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

No actor has 100 percent track record.

But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

Who then may trust the dice, at Fortune's throw?

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness.

The problem is that there is a lot of randomness in results in the short term. The underlying patterns can only be identified once you let the law of large numbers do its work.

His doubts recall Benford's Law, a theory about the frequency with which digits will appear in data. One implication of this law is that datasets with lots of zeroes at the end often turn out to be fraudulent.

Luck never goes alone, but with risk.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.

The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.

Do you think luck only lasts so long, and then lets a person down?

Es ist aber, wenn einmal das Unwahrscheinliche eintritt, nichts Höheres dabei, keinerlei Wunder oder Derartiges, wie es der Laie so gerne haben möchte. Indem wir vom Wahrscheinlichen sprechen, ist ja das Unwahrscheinliche immer schon inbegriffen und zwar als Grenzfall des Möglichen, und wenn es einmal eintritt, das Unwahrscheinliche, so besteht gür unserein keinerlei Grund zur Verwunderung, zur Erschütterung, zur Mystifikation.