Quotes About Probability

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an Intelligent Designer.

If the phenotypic change in the artefact had an influence on the success of replication of the new gene, natural selection would act, positively or negatively, to change the probability of similar artefacts existing in the future.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere near so improbable in practice.

science cannot even make probability judgements on

We can't prove there are no fairies but that doesn't mean we think there's a 50:50 chance fairies exist.

Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Volgens de wet van de grote getallen slaat het bizarre altijd wel een keer toe, als de steekproef maar groot genoeg is.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

I'm not a betting man.

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

The machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.

You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

If I were a gambling man I would put all my money on there not being anything other than this universe.

Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

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

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).