Quotes About Estimates

Back in the Vietnam War days, I attended dozens of anti-war demonstrations and the police's crowd-count never agreed with the organizers' count. My own observations never gave me clear reason to believe anybody's estimate. I don't know how people judge the size of large crowds, or how they can use techniques they sincerely believe have "objectivity." Even in looking at spilled marbles, I think people estimate very subjectively.

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

Biodiversity decline can certainly be self-reinforcing, with inbuilt tipping points and deadlines: the Pike paper estimates that business-as-usual closes the 'window of opportunity to deal with pandemics' in 2041.

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.

Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.

The problem is that we view estimates in different ways. Business likes to view estimates as commitments. Developers like to view estimates as guesses. The difference is profound.

Famine, Robert Conquest estimates that eleven million people died of starvation in 1932–33 and that seven million of those deaths were in the Ukraine.18 Most other estimates vary between seven and fourteen million lives lost. This was a predictable consequence of Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.

This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.

No one can know, of course, accurate population figures from an era before there was a census, but many officials on the ground at the time and later historians, demographers, and anthropologists have made estimates of great loss.

The total of British dead and wounded at Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle of Ypres, is in dispute, but a low estimate puts the number at 260,000; most reckonings are far higher.

While such numbers must always be regarded as broad estimates, one study has shown that each day sees some 78,000 new Christians worldwide and each week some 1,000 new churches are established in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Wagner 1983:20-21). Since those figures were published it became known that in China alone the decade of the 1980s saw up to 20,000 new Christians per day.

The death-tolls during the last years of the Qing dynasty and in China's forty years of non-Communist republican government are impossible to be precise about, but the figures are estimated to be very large.

Many people think that buying a fake product is harmless, but counterfeiting is estimated to result in annual losses of over $20 billion dollars to American companies.

No daban tantas explicaciones sobre las bajas iraquíes. El 14 de febrero, Kelly dijo que pensaba que «la cifra es muy elevada por el bombardeo constante». El 28 de febrero, los saudíes hablaban de unos 100.000 muertos iraquíes, mientras que un antiguo analista militar francés, el coronel Jean-Louis Dufour, calculaba que los muertos iraquíes ascendían a 15.000.4 Schwarzkopf hablo sólo de «una cifra muy, muy alta».

As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.

Howard Markel estimates that the total number of Americans who died of the 1918 pandemic was between 500,000 and 750,000; the

Here's a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.

Natural language terms that express likelihoods, like "very likely" and "unlikely," are useful but blunt instruments. The drive to improve on your initial estimates is what motivates you to check your information and learn more. If you hide behind the safety of a general term, there's no reason to improve on it or calibrate

Some economists estimate that for every family that goes bankrupt, there are about 15 more who are in the same amount of financial trouble and would profit from bankruptcy but just haven't filed.

I don't think people realize the extent to which TV networks are hurt when they carry public broadcasting. I think the estimate is that they lose a half-million dollars for a half day's programming.

months. Various studies estimate that somewhere between 70 million and 430 million people will be pushed back into extreme poverty over the next few years.

As soon as the idea of the Big Bang was proposed in the 1920s, astronomers set about trying to work out when the bang happened. Initial estimates were, not surprisingly, wildly inaccurate, but by the 1980s it was known that the universe was 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion years.

Estimates given at the coffee machine will (like the coffee) come back to haunt you.

The unparalleled exhibition of love that was made on Calvary shows how God estimates souls. If