Quotes About Probability

Errors are bound to occur when a judgment of similarity is substituted for a judgment of probability

Venn diagrams apply only to probability, not to similarity. Hence the predictable logical error that many people make.

They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.

Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.

Amos and I stumbled on the central flaw in Bernoulli's theory by a lucky combination of skill and ignorance.

The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary.

prepared for the future as you could be. An odd feature of what happened is that your System 1 treated the mere conjunction of

Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes.

if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker.

The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized: Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, this is not good news.

occupations by probability and by similarity in exactly the same way.

Gauß kam auf den Zufall zu sprechen, den Feind allen Wissens, den er immer habe besiegen wollen. Aus der Nähe betrachtet, sehe man hinter jedem Ereignis die unendliche Feinheit des Kausalgewebes. Trete man weit genug zurück, offenbarten sich die großen Muster. Freiheit und Zufall seien eine Frage der mittleren Entfernung, eine Sache des Abstands...

Yes, one could prepare, one could strive, one could make choices, but ultimately life was an elaborate game of providence and probability.

one could prepare, one could strive, one could make choices, but ultimately life was an elaborate game of providence and probability.

ultimately life was an elaborate game of providence and probability.

The best way to win at a game of chance is to remove chance from the equation.

The further we are from the last disaster, the closer we are to the next.

There is terror in numbers.

Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let's check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.

The basic sample is the kind called "random." It is selected by pure chance from the "universe," a word by which the statistician means the whole of which the sample is a part.