Quotes About Uncertainty

I don't remember lighting this cigarette and I don't remember if I'm here alone or waiting for someone.

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

along with our responses to them, determine

Or as the Nobel laureate Max Born wrote, "Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality."3

other words, the movement of the dye molecule was virtually impossible to predict before the fact even though it was relatively easy to understand afterward.

This again is a probabilistic process whose future is difficult to predict but whose past is easy to understand.

when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed.

first no one knew exactly how to interpret

Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.

The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.

We cannot know whether our single observation represents the mean or an outlier, an event to bet on or a rare happening that is not likely to be reproduced.

We fill in blanks and make guesses, but the truth about us is far more complex and subtle than that which can be understood as the straightforward calculation of conscious and rational minds.

if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events.

So the relevant question is, if thousands of people are tossing coins once a year and have been doing so for decades, what are the chances that one of them, for some fifteen-year period, will toss all heads?

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993

After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling…. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."6

As Steve Jobs said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

there remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are

A country with a philosophic base, freed of fundamental uncertainty and guilt, would not tolerate leaders who evade every choice, crawl down the middle of every road, and wait for the deluge. It would not tolerate any deluge by the waves of self-righteous, man-hating evil, foreign or domestic. It would not apologize for its greatness to the worshipers of weakness. It would not watch in despair while its youth turned in despair to cults, communes, and cocaine.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

It would not go away because it was my thought. It is not death that is terrible, but the knowledge of it: it would be utterly impossible to live if a man could know exactly and definitely the day and hour of his death.

I have to admit, this place gives me the creeps.' [said Scully]. 'The creeps?' said Mulder with a smile. 'Just because a bunch of big, strong men cleared out so fast they didn't finish their food? And then vanished into thin air? Don't be silly. I'm sure there's a nice scientific explanation. Oh, sorry Scully. You're the one who's supposed to be telling me that, right?

The sky was black and strewn with stars. I felt alone on the planet. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I didn't know where I was headed. I didn't know what to do with my life. I strained to look into my future, trying to picture the road ahead of me, searching for a glimpse of who I would become. All I could see was the night sky and the stars above me.