Quotes About Predictions

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times.

In 1900, Europe accounted for a quarter of the world's population. By 2060, it may account for just 6%—and almost a third of these will be more than 65 years old." Europe does face severe demographic problems, but the size of a population is not highly correlated with power, and "predictions of Europe's downfall have a long history of failing to materialize.

Leafpool can't do that," Lionpaw went on. "None of the medicine cats can. Jaypaw is already making predictions about trouble in other Clans, too. That must be his power—to see things other cats can't." "He's the least blind of us all

It is so easy for us theorists who build wonderful castles, beautiful ideas. Sometimes, it is remarkable, sometimes these beautiful ideas prove to be close to what the observations tell us. But often and also they turn out to be wrong.

I don't think a reporter should give advice or make predictions.

I've learned that the best political reporters never make predictions!

I won this poll thing in England about predictions, and it was all these journalists and reporters trying to say that I was going to be big in '06. My name was at the top of their list. I was like, are you sure you've got the right person?

The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about global warming; it came out in 1989 and soon appeared in more than twenty languages. At the time, the available data on climate change still fit on the top of my desk. What's astonishing is that twenty years later most of the predictions scientists were then making have proved too conservative.

Some of the most wonderful aspects and consequences of evolution have been discovered only recently. This is in stark contrast to creationism, which offers a static view of the world, one that cannot be challenged or tested with reason. And because it cannot make predictions, it cannot lead to new discoveries, new medicines, or new ways to feed all of us.

This is in stark contrast to creationism, which offers a static view of the world, one that cannot be challenged or tested with reason. And because it cannot make predictions, it cannot lead to new discoveries, new medicines, or new ways to feed all of us.

Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!

Social Security has been effective for 70 years; prior predictions of its demise have been totally overstated.

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

Donald Trump is either going to resign, he's going to be removed from office by impeachment, or I'm going to beat him in 2020. But one way or the other, he's not going to serve a second term.

Human adaptability simply doesn't get accurately captured in econometric models.

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people's faces.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.

And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right - they were just wrong in time.

Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.

I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.

These folks don't know what they're talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people." (Losses in the pools Hubler's group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.)

In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty," they wrote, "people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic error.