Quotes About Probability

The fact is, no formula that ignores luck's dominant role can ever be trusted. This is the great, liberating truth of the Fifth Axiom.

You should always remember, in the words of psychologist Paul Slovic, that risk is brewed from an equal dose of two ingredients - probabilities and consequences. Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.

It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.

Cuando dejas todo al albur del azar, de repente tu suerte se agota. Pat Riley, entrenador de baloncesto

también existe la posibilidad más probable de que vayamos a ser testigos de otro gran aumento especulativo en el valor de mercado que no tenga una justificación real en los valores subyacentes.

If you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that thunder will deafen us, then one of those things will turn out to be true and you'll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future.

Suppose you are walking in a thunderstorm, and you say to yourself, "I am not at all likely to be struck by lightning." The next moment you are struck. but you experience no surprise, because you are dead.

There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Perfect rationality consists, not in believing what is true, but in attaching to every proposition a degree of belief corresponding to its degree of credibility.

In general, if a man says, for instance, that the earth is flat, I am quite willing that he should propagate his opinion as hard as he likes. He may, of course, be right but I do not think he is. In practice you will, I think, do better to assume that the earth is round, although, of course, you may be mistaken. Therefore, I do not think we should go in for complete skepticism, but for a doctrine of degrees of probability.

Zeno believed that there is no such thing as chance, and that the course of nature is rigidly determined by natural laws.

To begin with rationality in opinion: I should define it merely as the habit of taking account of all relevant evidence in arriving at a belief. Where certainty is unattainable, a rational man will give most weight to the most probable opinion, while retaining others, which have an appreciable probability, in his mind as hypotheses which subsequent evidence may show to be preferable.

When admitting that nothing is certain, one must also, I think, admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

one should not regard anything that one accepts as quite certain, but only as probable in a greater or a less degree. Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.

Well, well," he said. "This can't be a coincidence." "It could," I said. "The odds aren't high, but they do exist." "Uh-huh.

When was the last time anyone in these parts had been attacked by a bear or a mountain lion? It was possible, but not probable, right? Maybe it was something harmless. A deer or a stray cow. Or a really big rabbit.

What the hell were the odds of attracting two stalkers within a year? Was it my aftershave?

They said if you put a chimp in front of a typewriter, eventually he'd type Hamlet. But if you asked a chimp who the late Senator Thomas from Missouri was, he would never, in a billion years, say Eagleton.

How much evidence would it take to convince us that something we consider improbable has actually happened? When does a hypothesis cross the line from impossibility to improbability and even to probability or virtual certainty?

To show what is still needed, let us examine how an ideal system might reason about the burglar alarm situation of Figure 1.2. Upon receiving the phone call from your neighbor, only the burglary hypothesis is triggered; your decision whether to drive home or stay at work is made solely on the basis of the parameter P(False alarm), which summarizes all other (unexplicated) causes for an alarm sound. After a moment's reflection, the possibility of an April Fools' Day joke may

But you are lucky. You are going to live. The one ball that might have killed you just pushed your intestines aside - like a marble dropped into a bowl of spaghetti.

Wenn von zwei ausschließlichen Varianten eine die Katastrophe, die andere das Warten auf die Katastrophe bereithält, so räumt das Abwarten doch wenigstens dem Zufall eine winzige Chance ein.

El lienzo es del siglo XIII o XIV, entre 1260 y 1390, y lo dictaminaron tres laboratorios distintos. La probabilidad de error es del cinco por ciento. La Iglesia ha aceptado el juicio del carbono 14.