Quotes About Probability

If you don't get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

The greatest risks are never the ones you can see and measure, but the ones you can't see and therefore can never measure. The ones that seem so far outside the boundary of normal probability that you can't imagine they could happen in your lifetime—even though, of course, they do happen, more often than you care to realize.

Probability doesn't make mistakes; people using probability make mistakes.

The selection rate is less than three per cent. Most of us can't crack these tests, basic probability. But who will drill it into our parents' heads?

Statistics is a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.

Statistics are just a way for the mathematician to evangelize his faith.

If there's a 50/50 chance that a forecast will go wrong, nine times out of ten it will.

I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

If you are born on the edge of a barrel of shit, you have to accept the likelihood of falling into it now and then.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

Vlad twisted his wrist, pinching his fingers together, spinning the bronze coin on the table. When it fell, he picked it up and did it again, counting. Thirty-two times it had fallen Slayer Society up. Twenty-two times it was down.

There is no such thing as "it can't happen here.

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

But, even if the quantum state gives us only probabilities for what we observe, once we get a result, there is something that is definite, because afterward you know exactly what the state is. It is the state corresponding to the result obtained by the measurement. Suppose we measure an electron's momentum, and get the result that the electron is moving north with momentum 17 (in some units). Then, just after the measurement we know that the

17. This is enshrined in a second rule,fn2 which we call Rule 2: The outcome of a measurement can only be predicted probabilistically. But afterward, the measurement changes the quantum state of the system being measured, by putting it in the state corresponding to the result of the measurement. This is called collapse of the wave function.

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

The probable is what usually happens. ~ ARISTOTLE

What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream! And at others, what a heap of absurdities it is!

I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you're bent over about the color, don't leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want.

My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.

Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.

Even as an empiricist, I have to say that I believe in luck. I've seen it too many times in politics to let it pass by unnoticed.

Investing is about predicting the future, and the future is inherently unpredictable. Therefore, the only way you can do better is to assess all the facts and truly know what you know and know what you don't know. That's your probability edge.