Quotes About Probability

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

El hombre es un artefacto determinista metido en un universo probabilístico

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1.

What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.

What was the point of laying out the odds of a gamble if the person taking it either didn't believe the numbers or didn't want to know them.

This difference between a probability statement on the one hand, and the probability of a statement, or the degree of belief in a statement on the other, may seem elusive, but is actually quite obvious.

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.

If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.

By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist.

For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet

Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions—or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.

Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin

The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability.

Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

he sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould

Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.

And thus, by combining the uncertainty of chance with the force of mathematical proof and by the reconciliation of two apparent opposites, she derives her name from both of them and rightfully assumes the wonderful name of Mathematics of Chance!

A wave of sadness and helplessness washed over me. I wanted to say that the People of the Alcove had not been murdered by Arne-Sayles (though I have no evidence to support that assertion and the probability is that at least one of them was). Mostly I wanted Raphael to come away from them so that I could stop thinking of them the way she thought of them – as murdered – and go back to thinking of them the way I always had before – as good, and noble, and peaceful.

because the results couldn't be guaranteed by the available

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