Quotes About Likelihood

Terms that express likelihoods mean very different things to different people. Using ambiguous terms can lead to confusion and miscommunication with people you want to engage for help. Being more precise, by expressing probabilities as percentages, makes it more likely you'll uncover information that can correct inaccuracies in your beliefs and broaden your knowledge.

As the geneticist David Searls observed, "The tendency for an event to occur varies inversely with one's preparation for it.

Quoting from Theodore Kaczynski's letter to the author: My speculative interpretation is that McVeigh resembles many people on the right who are attracted to powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of an likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people tend to invent excuses, often far-fetched ones, for acquiring weapons for which they have no real need.

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

It is only likely frauds that are detected.

Only that which happens is possible.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

If the odds are 50/50, I don't stand a chance!

bad, how likely is it to come

should be paid to the unlikelihood of

The process of concentrating on the goal every day greatly increases the likelihood of noticing an opportunity in the environment. The coincidence will create the illusion that writing down the goal causes the environment to produce opportunities. But in reality the only thing that changes is the person's ability to notice the opportunities.

I learned by observation that people who pursued extraordinarily unlikely goals were overly optimistic at best, delusional at worst, and just plain stupid most of the time.

Never assume you understand the odds of things. I

Never assume you understand the odds of things.

The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

It is the concept of likelihood that a real understanding of probability resides, and we must learn how to measure it.

Probable impossibilities are always to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

You're more likely to see someone fatally struck by lightning than witness a case of in-person voter fraud.

We would have children. Although we knew it wasn't too likely we could ever afford it, it was something to talk about, a game for Sundays. Such freedom now seems almost weightless.

Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.

Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.

Coincidence was possible. But what was much more likely was enemy action.