Quotes About Probability

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.

Obviously it's a statistics game.

I knew the statistics of playing pro football were 1% of 1%, so I just never planned on it.

If the prospect of a bad result gets the heart racing - a plane crash, a terrible disease, a loss of 30 percent of your portfolio - most people will take strong steps to avoid it. They will pay too little attention to a comforting thought, which is that worst-case scenarios usually don't come to fruition.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

Not a single Buddha, bodhisattva, or shengren in Europe, but in Asia: all philosophers and saints? What is that probability?

as any roulette player can tell you, past performance has no bearing on future random outcome. So

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics.

The univers is statistically more likely to be ironic than not

In the real world irrational things happened, impossible coincidences happened, because probability required that coincidences rarely, but not never, occur.

È una mia vecchia massima che, una volta escluso l'impossibile, ciò che resta, per quanto improbabile, non può essere che la verità ».

If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around.

She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you're the one. It could have gone either way. The coin didn't have no say. It was just you. Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.

A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

A small chance of distress or disgrace cannot, in our view, be offset by a large chance of extra returns.

In principle, there might be

no matter how effective conventional safety devices are, there is a form of accident that is inevitable.

All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted would betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.