Quotes & Sayings About Predicting

Economics is also an effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. This is why the world is in such a mess. — Stephen Hawking

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction. — Bernard Beckett

Being around a church culture, even leading a gathering of believers, I've gotten pretty good at predicting what's going to happen in a church service. — Francis Chan

We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current. — Charlie Munger

Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. — J. William Fulbright

The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny. — Che Guevara

Here in New York, we're media obsessed. Writers write about writers who write about writers and reporters and freelancers, and it's just a festival of information. We're all analyzing and examining and predicting, and I can't imagine that it's like that everywhere else. — Lauren Weisberger

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this. — Richard P. Feynman

I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for "tenacious clinging to a discredited belief" was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended. — Carol Tavris

We're often wrong at predicting who or what will transform us. Encountering certain people, books, music, places, or ideas ... at just the right time can immediately make our lives happier, richer, more beautiful, resonant, or meaningful. When it happens, we feel a kind of instant love for them, both deep and abiding. Now and then it can be something as trifling as a children's book, a returned telephone call, or a night at a seaside bar in Mykonos. — Jonathan Carroll

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies. — Rem Koolhaas

How good are markets in predicting real-world developments? Reading the record, it is striking how many calamities that I anticipated did not in fact materialise.
Financial markets constantly anticipate events, both on the positive and on the negative side, which fail to materialise exactly because they have been anticipated.
It is an old joke that the stock market has predicted seven of the last two recessions. Markets are often wrong. — George Soros

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs. — Harold E. Varmus

No more prizes for predicting the rain, only prizes for building the arks — Don Edward Beck

We listen to the entrepreneur. We try to have a fine tuning fork to understand what they are saying and whether that makes sense and know it when we see it. We don't try to do too much predicting. — David Sze

I am well aware of my incompetence in predicting human reactions. But I would have been prepared to bet on the first word that Rosie would say when she received the information. I was correct by a factor of six. 'Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. — Graeme Simsion

Kahneman's evidence shows that we suck at remembering and predicting our own well-being. We as a culture still ignore this empirical evidence, recommending to live our lives so as to avoid deathbed regrets. Deathbed regrets are like Hollywood films: they stir passions for a couple hours, but are poorly connected to reality. They are not good criteria for a well-lived life. — Nick Winter

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting. — Eric Maskin

My mother always told me growing up I had a punchable face. Little did I know she was predicting my television career. — Michael Emerson

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive. — Dennis Gabor

Predicting what content is going to fly is like looking into a crystal ball. I try not to say, 'Yeah, 'Bridesmaids' opened the door to make more movies about women.' I mean, did it? I don't know; where are they? — Elizabeth Banks

Futurists are already predicting the day mankind builds its replacement, Artificial Intelligence. Daniel Wilson shows what might happen when that computer realizes its creators are no longer needed. Lean prose, great characters, and almost unbearable tension ensure that Robopocalypse is going to be a blockbuster. Once started I defy anyone to put it down. — Jack Du Brul

The basic trouble with all long-range population projections is that they are driven by assumptions about birth levels - and there is still no reliable method for predicting fertility levels a generation from now, to say nothing of a century hence, — Nicholas Eberstadt

I'm not engaged in predicting random number generators. I actually get phone calls from people who want to know what lottery numbers are going to win. I don't have a clue. — Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks. — Lou Gerstner

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, droughts and floods is in line with what climate scientists have been predicting for decades - and evidence is mounting that what's happening is more severe than predicted, and will get far worse still if we fail to act. — David Suzuki

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000. — Michio Kaku

If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve. — Malcolm Gladwell

So, regarding the time frame, I'm only too willing to admit that my crystal ball, like everybody else's, is cracked. If I could predict precisely, I would have started predicting the stock market and would now be living with a bunch of young women on Bora Bora, having bought it. — Paul R. Ehrlich

One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change ... — Diane Ravitch

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. — Tom Stoppard

The worst way to know if people would pay to use a product or if they would use it repeatedly is ask them directly. Humans are very bad at predicting their future behavior. In — Tomer Sharon

As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation. Now we heap similar ridicule upon stratoplane or rocket ships for trans-Atlantic flights. (1933)
[Predicting high-altitude jet aircraft for routine long-distance travel.] — Auguste Piccard

I'm predicting that we'll finally have a computer will search my e-mail automatically and delete every message that begins with 'thought you'd be interested,' and then give an electrical shock to the sender to remind him or her to stop send that kind of message. — Scott Adams

As recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future. — Michelle Alexander

Droughts especially appear to have accompanied the spirits of the dead in bee-form, and for this reason the honey offering was almost always customary in rain-magic, and the power of predicting rain was attributed to the bee. — Hilda M. Ransome

I am not in the business of predicting general stock market of business fluctuations. If you think I can do this, or think it is essential to an investment program, you should not be in the partnership. — Warren Buffett

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

I am not predicting here that Obama will fail like Jimmy Carter. What I am predicting is the Republican Party is not extinct and will after a period of time become a strong opposition party. — Ed Rollins

Predicting the stock market is really predicting how other investors will change estimates they are now making with all their best efforts. This means that, for a market forecaster to be right, the consensus of all others must be wrong and the forecaster must determine in which direction-up or down-the market will be moved by changes in the consensus of those same active investors. — Burton G. Malkiel

To regard one's immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth. — Anton Chekhov

There is nothing that fascinates us more, little that agitates the body more completely. Information warns us of danger, prepares us for action, helps us survive. And it enables us to perform that most magical of all tricks - predicting the future. — John Coates

To tell you the truth, there are all these websites predicting my early death, and it's starting to work on me! — Artie Lange

I regret very much to hear so many people, many of my own countrymen, predicting war, stating that Europe is preparing and arming for such a conflict. — Frank B. Kellogg

Others can be very hard to solve - two notoriously hard examples are predicting extended weather conditions or stock-market performance. — Anasse Bari

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am. — Rick Perlstein

Instead of looking at leadership as decision making - as a rational process of sifting through data, analyzing trends, and making decisions based on predicting futures - a design framework emphasizes pragmatic experimentation. — Frank J. Barrett

Predicting causes litter. — Warren Ellis

If you can predict the rate at which you create (or create and grow) qualified pipeline, and you know your average close rate(s), then you can start predicting your revenue. — Aaron Ross

Kylie thought hell would be announcing a snow day before she agreed with anything her mom said. But right now, Kylie wondered how many inches they were predicting. — C.C. Hunter

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have. — James Surowiecki

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational. — Larry Niven

If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God. — Paul Krugman

Methods for predicting the future: 1) read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards, or crystal balls ... collectively known as "nutty methods;" 2) put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer ... commonly referred to as "a complete waste of time." — Scott Adams

Everyday though, I'm just looking for like- I always ask people, What are you listening to? What sounds are good to you? Alot of people are in their car, in the club or on the internet looking and I just don't do any of that. Usually if I'm out and about it's because I have something to do, because I'm like a really big home body. If I'm at home, im watching Nickelodeon cartoons so sometimes I'm out of the loop with the cool music, but for sure I'm predicting that J.Cole is going to be good. — Jhene Aiko

For me there's insecurity when you're releasing an album because you spend all of this time working on that one thing and then once it's done, it's done. After you put it out there to the public you never know which songs are going to work or even if the album is going to work as a whole so there is a little bit of nervousness around predicting what the numbers will be and if it's going to be well- received. — John Legend

I stopped predicting the future a long time ago. — Fred Durst

You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts. — Daniel Kahneman

Speculators are obsessed with predicting: guessing the direction of stock prices. Every morning on cable television, every afternoon on the stock market report, every weekend in Barron's, every week in dozens of market newsletters, and whenever business people get together. In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a purely speculative undertaking. — Seth Klarman

It will be possible in a few more years to build radio controlled rockets which can be steered into such orbits beyond the limits of the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the Earth. A little later, manned rockets will be able to make similar flights with sufficient excess power to break the orbit and return to Earth. (1945) [Predicting communications satellites.] — Arthur C. Clarke

Those market researchers ... are playing games with you and me and with this entire country. Their so-called samples of opinion are no more accurate or reliable than my grandmother's big toe was when it came to predicting the weather. — Dan Rather

Pardon me, not to sound elitist, but I wanted to put something together that I would enjoy. I thought at that time, what satiated me, what interested me, what intrigued me, I thought other people would like also. And you blend that with some forward thinking of predicting the UFC and MMA were going to be ultimately as big as it became. — Bill Goldberg

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.' — Nate Silver

Charts are great for predicting the past. — Peter Lynch

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down and things may be different tomorrow but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. — Steve Jobs

...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so. — Paul Edward Gottfried

We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs. — Daniel Kahneman

Prophets such as Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former glory, are in fact making veiled criticisms of their current king and the present order, which the prophets imply have fallen short of the Davidic ideal. — Reza Aslan

I'm not predicting; I just love playing with superconductors. — Larry Niven

I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting. — Conor Oberst

I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried. — Paul Krugman

A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point ... and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. — Ilana Mercer

Leela: Why are we listening to them? It is a waste of time.
The Doctor; It is difficult to know what will be a waste of time until after the time has been wasted, by which time it is too late. So predicting what will be a waste of time is something of a waste of time. Unless it gives you pleasure of course when it probably doesn't count as a waste of time.
Leela (yawning): I am sorry I did not hear what you said, Doctor.
The Doctor (smiling): That was a waste of time then. — Chris Boucher

If a person can turn from predicting illness to anticipating recovery, the foundation for cure is laid. — Bernie Siegel

Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it? And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nothing will ever replace the experience of wandering haphazardly through a great bookstore, no matter how many algorithms are developed to find matches for our tastes. That's because not only is there no accounting for taste, there is no predicting it either. — Dominique Browning

I don't always do a lot of predicting, but, when I get a really strong feeling about something, I will tell people. — Michael Johnson

Speculating and predicting what lies beyond the boundary ins fascinating. Finding out is even more fascinating. — Wallace H. Tucker

If I sound as if I'm always predicting ominous things, it's because I'm a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes ends up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. You have to only open a newspaper on any given day and weigh the good news versus the bad, and you'll see what I mean. — Haruki Murakami

The gray-haired growser, who proved to be a lawyer, had made it clear how much he loathed the people who were, in his view, attempting to undermine the American Constitution by imposing a state religion - or possibly it was "religion state by state," for his argument grew more confused with each Martini he sank. At any rate he was noisily predicting that the result would be world domination by the Communist bloc because they would wind up with a monopoly of practical science while his own people would be reduced to praying, sticking pins in chance-opened Bibles, and casting lots to decide whose eldest son should be sacrificed to stave off disaster. — John Brunner

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient ( ... ), and a random one ( ... ). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

...Nyla was right in predicting that, for me, life would go on into old age and my promise has been kept too, for every now and then over the years, the ghosts have slipped out from the past and I have kept brief company with my friends of long ago. — Edward Beauclerk Maurice

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women. — Stephen Hawking

unless a company has some kind of economic moat, predicting how much shareholder value it will create in the future is pretty much a crapshoot, regardless of what the historical track record looks like. Looking at the numbers is a start, but it's only a start. Thinking carefully about the strength of the company's competitive advantage, and how it will (or won't) be able to keep the competition at bay, is a critical next step. — Pat Dorsey

I typically don't get into predicting the success of my projects. I've been involved with a lot of projects that I thought should have really gained notoriety and furthered my career, only to be met with the cold grasp of disappointment. So I typically stay away from predicting how a film will do. — Bokeem Woodbine

Two thirds of federal disaster aid is weather related,and though we cannot prevent bad weather, we are getting better at predicting it. The Commerce Department's NDRI will help save lives and protect property. We will be working closely with FEMA, the Interior Department and other federal agencies, with state and local governments and with our nation's businesses. — William M. Daley

Just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur-even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say-at the moment it occurred I was thinking of fucking Risa Walker. — Russell Banks

Some 1.2 billion people in the world still have too little to eat; the same number today suffer from being overweight ... ..For the first time in 100 years medical experts are predicting that life expectancy in developed countries will fall. Thanks to obesity our children face the prospect of dying younger than us. — Felicity Lawrence

Predicting the market is always tough. — Alex Berenson

Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4-a-gallon gas? ... That's interesting. I hadn't heard that. — George W. Bush

As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming. — Al Gore

Our greatest hope is for the experience of joy, and often we are not as smart as we think we are when it comes to predicting what would bring us that joy ... Hope that is attached to a particular outcome is looking for pleasure but fishing for pain, because attachment itself is a source of pain. It is best to hope for an experience of life in all its fullness-a life that can embrace both joy and sorrow, and will still be at peace. — Marianne Williamson

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next). — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

I'm the only one who was predicting the Nintendo Wii would beat Sony's PlayStation 3. — Nolan Bushnell

That combination, perhaps, deterred me from telling Netanyahu the most difficult truth of all. Simply: that he had much in common with Obama. Both men were left-handed, both believed in the power of oratory and that they were the smartest men in the room. Both were loners, adverse to hasty decision making and susceptible to a strong woman's advice. And both saw themselves in transformative historical roles. Their similarities, perhaps as much as their differences, heightened the chances for friction between the president and Netanyahu, I could have told him. But I did not. Rather, as the prime minister descended the stairs to the tarmac that early May 20 morning, I merely said, "Welcome to Washington, sir," and extended my hand. This he gripped and pulled me toward him. With his eyes still flaring, he recalled the cable I sent him months back predicting the president's speech. "You called it right," he whispered. — Michael B. Oren

I've become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future. — Noreena Hertz

Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906] — Edmund Morris