Quotes About Reliability

If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their necks they are putting on the line.

We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust a ruler's reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.

But he left us with a good lesson: never trust the words of a man who is not free.

And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event.

No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.

that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

let governments predict (it makes officials feel better about themselves and justifies their existence) but do not set much store by what they say. Remember that the interest of these civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate—not to get to the truth.

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

Unreliable people carried less weight than reliable ones. You can't fool people more than twice.*1

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

I know very few people who, when they say they want to do something, end up doing it.

that they wouldn't advertise it so loudly if it weren't good for their bottom line.

Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst, we don't know how long they'll last.

Lovers of paychecks are lazy…but they would never let you down at times like these.

You are buying dependability.

dependability is a driver behind many transactions.

The first error lies in taking a projection too seriously, without heeding its accuracy.

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider

Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.