Quotes About Predictions

Predictions about complex systems, in other words, are highly subject to the law of diminishing returns: The first pieces of information help a lot, but very quickly you exhaust whatever potential for improvement exists.

Karl Marx began making predictions about the consequences of capitalism. He saw in the increase in the production of goods a decrease in the value of labor and a widening inequality between the rich and the poor.

I've had projects before where everyone says 'This is going to be the big thing,' and it doesn't really turn out to be. Then there is a little project you do and forget about, and then it comes out, and it's huge.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections.

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office.

Tesla has defied everyone's predictions again and again. It has such a unique position in the market, and so far, whatever people think about Tesla and its business model, there is one fact that nobody can dispute: It pretty much has the market to itself.

It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings.

groupuscules making their lonely cataclysmic prophesies.

Contrary to her father's predictions, Ida inflicted far more damage on Standard Oil than she received in return.

That is, when I said above that dissonance theory made clear predictions at its core, what I implicitly meant by at its core were situations in which the person's self-concept was at issue.

Pundits talk as if polls are always right, but if they were, pundits wouldn't have jobs.

what had destroyed the Earth was not any unforeseeable disaster at all, nor any sudden and irreversible calamity. No. Predictions were made and justified and proved to be valid, and then simply ignored for commercial reasons.

Perhaps the most common—and the most important—forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling

Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of "falsifiability": A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified.

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

As the Olympic torch neared Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980, signaling the opening of that year's Winter Olympics, newspapers and magazines throughout the world offered predictions on who would win medals in the major sports. Not a single publication gave the American men's hockey team a chance against the world powers.

If Britain votes to leave the European Union, then that could have huge implications for the entire island of Ireland and, given all the predictions, would run counter to the democratic wishes of the Irish people.

Because of recent improvements in the accuracy of theoretical predictions based on large scale ab initio quantum mechanical calculations, meaningful comparisons between theoretical and experimental findings have become possible.

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.

organisers of weight-guessing competitions and advisers helping people to refine their guesses.