Quotes About Likelihood

I think I have always had the misguided sense that worry and fear serve as an insurance policy of sorts. On a subconscious level, I subscribe to the notion that if you worry about something, it is somehow less likely to happen. Well, I am here to say that it doesn't work like that. The very thing you fear the most can still happen anyway. And when it does, you feel that much more cheated for having feared it in the first place.

On a subconscious level, I subscribe to the notion that if you worry about something, it is somehow less likely to happen. Well, I am here to say that it doesn't work like that. The very thing you fear the most can still happen anyway. And when it does, you feel that much more cheated for having feared it in the first place.

Perhaps the most serious objection is what Tetlock calls the "wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy," the risk of being charged with "failure" when an event doesn't happen even when the intelligence estimate claimed there was only a 70 percent chance that it would. When it comes to likelihood, we tend to conflate maybe with sure thing.87

The chances of a reunion now are less likely. I was thinking of having a 40th anniversary of the band, but now they are really another band, so it's all a bit weird.

An estimate is not a number. An estimate is a distribution.

Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment.

there was a greater likelihood that individuals who committed crimes within the Nazi system would take personal responsibility for their actions, than there was that war criminals who served Stalin or Hirohito would take such responsibility.

As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

I do not believe anything very certainly, but everything very probably.

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

Repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen.

Writing a history of the world is a ridiculous thing to do. The amount of information is too vast for any individual to absorb, the reading limitless and the likelihood of error immense. The only case for doing it, and for reading it, is that not having a sense of world history is even more ridiculous.

Bayesian statistics?

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable.

Yet, in the end, we don't believe in creation just because it is more likely scientifically. We believe in creation because we trust what God has revealed to us in the Bible.

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.

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?

Past performance speaks a tremendous amount about one's ability and likelihood for success.

Almost all life depends on probabilities.

We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.

Andrew Mauboussin and Michael Mauboussin came up with this pretty comprehensive list of these types of terms for a survey they conducted: Almost always More often than not Serious possibility Almost certainly Never Slam dunk Always Not often Unlikely Certainly Often Usually Frequently Possibly With high probability Likely Probably With low probability Maybe Rarely With moderate probability Might happen Real possibility

For any single decision, there are different ways the future could unfold—some better, some worse. When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don't know where they lead) and others impossible. The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn't determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.

If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You've identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.