Quotes About Probability

Del sí al no, ¿cuántos quizá?

Of the fellows least likely to be president, you'd have to vote Jack No. 1.

The math is simple, and laid out in Table 5.6. From 20 million traffic stops, 2.4 percent lead to a search. Of those, just 33 percent led to contraband (0.8 percent of stops), and just 12 percent of the searches led to a contraband-arrest combination (0.29 percent of stops). That is, 99.7 percent of traffic stops fail to generate a drug or contraband arrest. The "sheer numbers game" the California trooper describes is a bad gamble.

Atheists have had to resort to wild speculations to give chance more of a chance.

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

The croupier at the roulette table does not claim that he knows something about the order in which the numbers will come up. He just sees to it that the bets are properly paid off and that the house isn't gypped - which is a job requiring competence.

Admittedly, it is preposterous to suggest that stock speculation is like coin-flipping. I know that there is more skill to stock speculation. What I have never been able to determine is - how much more?

Das Mögliche ist beinahe unendlich, das Wirkliche streng begrenzt, weil doch nur eine von allen Möglichkeiten zur Wirklichkeit werden kann. Das Wirkliche ist nur ein Sonderfall des Möglichen und deshalb auch anders denkbar.

Une des plus grandes sources d'erreurs, c'est de prendre le probable pour certain, et l'improbable pour impossible.

Pocas cosas son verdaderamente aleatorias

impossible; a word which, in common conversation, is often used to signify not only improbable, but often what is really very likely, and, sometimes, what hath certainly happened; an hyperbolical violence like that which is so frequently offered to the words infinite and eternal; by the former of which it is usual to express a distance of half a yard, and by the latter, a duration of five minutes. And thus it is as usual to assert the impossibility of losing what is already actually lost.

Is there some risk every day we walk out our front door? Every time we get in our car? Yeah. Are we materially less safe now than we were 10 years ago? Whatever delta there is, it's very small.

Yes, I think poker really isn't gambling.

Big money is made in the stock market by being on the right side of the major moves. The idea is to get in harmony with the market. It's suicidal to fight trends. They have a higher probability of continuing than not.

In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether is it possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true.

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.

You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.

I'd compare stock pickers to astrologers but I don't want to bad mouth astrologers.

Earlier, in 1954, biochemist George Wald argued for the causal efficacy of chance in conjunction with vast expanses of time. As he explained, "Time is in fact the hero of the plot…. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain."2

Gain is a parameter in neural network modeling, which influences the probability that a neuron fires at a given activation level. Single cell recordings in non-human primates have shown that the likelihood of a neuron firing, given a constant sensory input, is enhanced when the stimulus dimension that is preferentially processed by the neuron is attended to.11

God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.