Quotes About Probability

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

He asks the 80 students to respond based on their 'gut feeling'. Again, students are given five options, ranging from 'less than 1%' to 'above 40%'. About half of them believe the true answer is less than 5%, of which plenty go for the 'less than 1%' option. Only 1 in 6 get it right, picking the highest option: it turns out that the true figure is 41%. He invites those people – 13 in total – to stand up.

Every baby born is a gamble, but that doesn't stop the human race from making babies, does it?

Maybe fate's arithmetic is so diffuse that it's not arithmetic at all.

Rip never dates anyone," she observes. "Why?" I ask. "He doesn't like the odds.

Women past and present face the adaptive problem of choosing men who not only have the necessary resources but also show a willingness to commit those resources specifically to them. This problem may be more difficult than it seems at first. Although resources can often be directly observed, commitment cannot. Instead, gauging commitment requires looking for probabilistic cues. Love is one of the most important cues to commitment.

What both paradoxes show is that decisions based on probabilistic arguments are not logical decisions. Logic and probabilistic arguments are incompatible... Jerry Cornfield justified the findings that smoking causes lung cancer by appealing to a piling up of evidence, where study after study shows results that are highly improbable unless you assume that smoking is the cause of the cancer. Is it illogical to believe that smoking causes cancer?

Gosset examined the data and determined that the counts of yeast cells could be modeled with a probability distribution known as the "Poisson distribution.

What remains of the Pearsonian revolution is the idea that the "things" of science are not the observables but the mathematical distribution functions that describe the probabilities associated with observations.

After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.

In journalism," said Lousteau, "everything that is probable is true. That is an axiom.

Most people view risk taking primarily as a way to make money. Bearing higher risk generally produces higher returns...But it can't always work that way, or else risk investments wouldn't be risky. And when risk bearing doesn't work, it really doesn't work, and people are reminded what risk's all about.

Most people view risk taking primarily as a way to make money. Bearing higher risk generally produces higher returns...But it can't always work that way, or else risky investments wouldn't be risky. And when risk bearing doesn't work, it really doesn't work, and people are reminded what risk's all about.

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

All conspiracy-spotting should start from the assumption that even an almighty cock-up is always more likely than a complex conspiracy.

A millipede ran into a centipede on the street. The millipede said in surprise, "Wow, what are the odds of this?!" "Oh," answered the centipede, "about 10 to 1.

A promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 percent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year.

If they had rankings in baseball, maybe I would have been able to do the math and figure out my chances of being a professional baseball player versus a tennis player. But that was the decision-maker for me, I just thought I was better in tennis.

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

Don't worry. It's scientifically unlikely that the universe will explode into a million particles at any given moment.

Those were long odds. Really, really long odds. Ridiculously long odds, really. When you have to measure them in astronomical units, it probably isn't a good bet.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself

Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent.

People reasoning on essences may sometimes substitute certitude for probability, even very great probability. But we know nothing about essences and accordingly lose our certitude.