Probability Quotes by Brian Tracy, Rene Descartes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ross McKitrick, Charles Caleb Colton, Philip Morrison and many others.
To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will be electrifying. There is a high probability we will witness the crackup of one of the most influential scientific paradigms of the 20th century, and the implications for policy and global politics could be staggering.
As a doctor, as a man of science, I can tell you there is no such thing as curses Everything just happens as a question of probability. The statistical likelihood of a specific event.
I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.
People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.
Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.
An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it’s a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.
In the financial system we have today, with less risk concentrated in banks, the probability of systemic financial crises may be lower than in traditional bank-centered financial systems
Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.
Does the logic connect? What are the range of probably outcomes? You want to figure out what those probabilities are and ideally be the House. It’s fine to gamble, as long as you’re the House. Also, listen to critical feedback, particularly from friends. Generally they will be thinking it but they won‘t tell you.
ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer‘s thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination . . .
One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen.
Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.
Contrary to the popular notion that only creationism relies on the supernatural, evolutionism must as well, since the probabilities of random formation of life are so tiny as to require a ‘miracle‘ for spontaneous generation tantamount to a theological argument.
The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . . .
Wherever you observe persecution, there is more than a probability that truth lies on il the persecuted side.
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own… the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
Life is a school of probability.
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.
Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.
I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.
We can never achieve absolute truth but we can live hopefully by a system of calculated probabilities.
Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.
I have found, unfortunately, that if I take on too many projects at one time, there is a higher probability of those projects sucking.
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
The beauty of any conspiracy theory is that because it can’t be proved, that just makes it more ‘real.’ It’s not a question of believing or not believing, really; it’s more a question of just accepting a series of probabilities that lead to an undeniable conclusion.
In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.
It is profitable wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and pains are spared in not flattering ourselves against probabilities.
Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.
If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic.
Physics tells us observations can’t be predicted absolutely. Rather, there’s a range of possible observations each with a different probability.
The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it
Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.
If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.
Its not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents.
We don’t know the probabilities of future events. Still, you have to take action, and so you do it on gut feeling. That’s the world we live in.
All knowledge degenerates into probability.
Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.
One of the most striking and fundamental things about probability theory is that it leads to an understanding of the otherwise strange fact that events which are individually capricious and unpredictable can, when treated en masse, lead to very stable average performances.
The probability that a genius can do stupid things is much higher than the probability that a stupid can do genius things.
The entrepreneurial mind-set is that risk is the heightened probability that there is a big range of possible outcomes.
On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
As in the piling up of hypothetical alternatives, creative accidents follow the law of probabilities the more we fish, the more likely we are to get a strike.
The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
Probability of human error is considerably higher than that of machine error.
Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.
One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.
When a coincidence seems amazing, that’s because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.
The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet. The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities.
Moral certainty is never more than probability.
A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made.
The moment of enlightenment is when a person’s dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.
In far from equilibrium conditions, the concept of probability that underlies Boltzmann’s order principle is no longer valid if the structures we observe do not correspond to a maximum of complexions
A stochastic process is about the results of convolving probabilities-which is just what management is about, as well.
I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.
This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.
There is no error which hath not some appearance of probability resembling truth, which, when men who study to be singular find out, straining reason, they then publish to the world matter of contention and jangling.
It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.
When you do life a certain way, it’s bound to give you a higher level of probability to succeed, and that’s what we preach.
A good test case is a test case that has a high probability of detecting an undiscovered error, not a test case that show that the program works correctly.
A property in the 100-year floodplain has a 96 percent chance of being flooded in the next hundred years without global warming. The fact that several years go by without a flood does not change that probability.
Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.
If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
At one level, SXSW exemplifies serendipity, because whenever I come, I get these unexpected meetings with people I never knew existed, and you couldn’t have planned it. But by making the choice to come to SXSW, I’m increasing the probability of those encounters.
Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.
Digital television is no longer a probability, it is a certainty.
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.
He who has heard the same thing told by 12,000 eye-witnesses has only 12,000 probabilities, which are equal to one strong probability, which is far from certain.
The Law of Probabilities: the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work.
I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what’s the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.
Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4.
Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!
The price of freedom is the probability of crime. The price of protection is the probability of slavery.
Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability.
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of an adult.
Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.
The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.
First get a clear notion of what you desire to accomplish and then in all probability you will succeed in doing it.
Probability is the very guide of life.
Almost all life depends on probabilities.
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we’re building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.
History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
Hope is the belief in the probability of the possible rather than the necessity of the probable.
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.
We don’t deal in absolutes. We deal in probabilities.
The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.
The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable – it could not have been any other way– a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable
Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management.
Most of us think that we are ‘better than average’ in most things. We are also ‘miscalibrated,’ meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn’t line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.
The historical museum has to be very conservative and careful in its choices. The modern museum, on the other hand, has to be audacious, to take chances. It has to consider the probability that it would be wrong in a good many cases and take the consequences later.
It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.
Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known – it’s not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.
The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.
motivation is highest when the probability of success is 50 percent: We don’t get involved if the task is too easy or too hard.
Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with “randomness“. Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information.
In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics – unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
The probability of failure doesn’t matter to me.
I described to my patent lawyer our new algorithm-that I was hoping to patent- about detecting clustering, that involved three probabilities О± , ОІ, Оі that add-up to 1, and mentioned that it is like “a three-sided coin”. A few days later he came up with a patent application for a “three-sided-coin”.
Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they’re never really certainties
Based on the law of probability Everything is possible because The sheer existence of possibility Confirms the existence Of impossibility.
The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
I like the probability of the impossible.
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.
Mental Management is the process of maximising the probability of having a consistent mental performance, under pressure, on demand
A reasonable scale of probability-what is likely-forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure.
Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.
Seeking an acquisition from the start is more than just bad advice for an entrepreneur. For the entrepreneur it leads to short term tactical decisions rather than company-building decisions and in my view often reduces the probability of success.
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
Arguments derived from probabilities are idle.
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
Customers are wrestling with mission-critical decisions, evaluating solutions that all sound the same, and struggling to achieve the value they expect, when experience has shown them that far too many solutions come packaged with a high degree of risk and a low probability of success.
Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!
Said to William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he asked about the practical worth of electricity.
Said to William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he asked about the practical worth of electricity.
The probability that we will get into a car accident is a million times higher than the probability we will suffer as a result of terrorist act.
In an environment where you’ve got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you’ll be successful is actually much higher.
My district has been hit with three 500-year floods in the last several years, so either you believe that we had a one-in-over-100-million probability that occurred, or you believe as I do that there’s a new normal, and we have changing weather patterns, and we have climate change. This is the science.
A reasonable probability is the only certainty.
Anything is possible, but not always probable. Innovators increase the probability of the impossible.
The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.
Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.
Hope does not always require probability.
If you have the feeling of choice, if you feel free, you will be better off. And when I say better off I mean that if people feel they have control over their lives, they call in for fewer sick days from work. They have a lesser probability of having a heart attack or stroke. They live longer. They’re happier.
Probabilities direct the conduct of the wise man.
It doesn’t matter what your probability of failure is. If there’s a 90% chance of failure, there’s a 10% chance of changing the world.
Make your judgment trustworthy by trusting it. Cultivate regular periods of silence and meditation. The best time to build judgment is in solitude, when you can think out things for yourself without the probability of interruption.
In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.
A further aspect I should like to discuss is what I call the practice of infinite escape clauses. I believe we developed this practice to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of self-reproducing state is zero. This is what we must conclude from classical quantum mechanical principles as Wigner demonstrated
Frankly, I’ve had the opportunity to get certain accolades, make it to the conference finals, get awards, all this other stuff that doesn’t matter. I’m looking only on championship probability. I just feel like I haven‘t accomplished much unless I can somehow get that done.
If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.
The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.
We have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we haven’t yet defined. . . . With a low-probability, high-impact event like this . . . If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.
The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.
The highest historical probability can be adduced in support of the proposition that, if it were possible to annihilate the Bible, and with it all its influences, we should destroy with it the whole spiritual system of the moral world.
Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they’re never really certainties.
Hope is not the basis for policy. Wise policymakers analyze major issues such as immigration carefully and look at facts and probabilities instead of just hoping for the best.
The more people you contact, the higher your sales will be because of the law of probabilities.
Although we deal with probabilities and expectations, the actual results can deviate substantially from such expectations, particularly on a short-term basis.
My advice to the unborn is, don’t be born with a gambling instinct unless you have a good sense of probabilities.
I don’t believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
