Quotes & Sayings About Predictions

To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions. — Richard Courtney

most importantly, this prediction is less of a prophecy and more a way of discussing our present choices. If the discussion makes us choose differently, so that the prediction is proven wrong, all the better. What's the point of making predictions if they cannot change anything? — Yuval Noah Harari

For his part, Mendeleev scanned Lecoq de Boisbaudran's data on gallium and told the experimentalist, with no justification, that he must have measured something wrong, because the density and weight of gallium differed from Mendeleev's predictions. This betrays a flabbergasting amount of gall, but as science philosopher-historian Eric Scerri put it, Mendeleev always "was willing to bend nature to fit his grand philosophical scheme." The only difference between Mendeleev and crackpottery is that Mendeleev was right: Lecoq de Boisbaudran soon retracted his data and published results that corroborated Mendeleev's predictions. — Sam Kean

I've been doing this a long time, and I've come to learn that predictions don't mean much. Too much lies outside the realm of medical knowledge. A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there's nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that's not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most of the time you have left. — Nicholas Sparks

Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable. — Peter Watts

The strange feature of partial reflection by two surfaces has forced physicists away form making absolute predictions to merely calculating the probability of an event. Quantum electrodynamics provides a method for doing this-drawing little arrows on a piece of paper. The probability of an event is represented by the area of the square of an arrow. For example, an arrow representing a probability of 0.04 (4%) has a length of 0.2. — Richard Feynman

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations. — Isaiah Berlin

I think people are going to return to sanity when they see how ridiculous many of these charges are, and how the predictions are not borne out. — Dixie Lee Ray

On the conservative side, today's libertarianism is far more dogmatic and devoid of qualification than the liberalism of Adam Smith or J.S. Mill. Like Marxism, libertarianism is a utopian worldview based on an economic-determinist vision of history. Unlike Marxism, libertarianism is highly specific in its predictions about the transition to the utopian world order, rendering it vulnerable to fact. — Michael Lind

With high hope for the future, no prediction is ventured. — Abraham Lincoln

When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better. — William Of Ockham

In a world with amazing amounts of statistics and demographics available, If you don't utilize foresight, statistics, demographics, projections and predictions the competition will. — Akutra-Ramses Atenosis Cea

In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined. — Nate Silver

And it is natural for System 1 to generate overconfident judgments, because confidence, as we have seen, is determined by the coherence of the best story you can tell from the evidence at hand. Be warned: your intuitions will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them. — Daniel Kahneman

Not going to have a very good month, are you?" she said sardonically as Crookshanks curled up in her lap. "Ah well, at least I'm forewarned," Ron yawned. "You seem to be drowning twice," said Hermione. "Oh am I?" said Ron, peering down at his predictions. "I'd better change one of them to getting trampled by a rampaging hippogriff." "Don't you think it's a bit obvious you've made these up?" said Hermione. "How dare you!" said Ron, in mock outrage. "We've been working like house-elves here!" Hermione raised her eyebrows. "It's just an expression," said Ron hastily. — J.K. Rowling

Predictions are predictions. If you could predict the stock market, you would be super rich. But I have to race the race. It doesn't matter what I've done over the last few years. I have to race at the Olympics. — Mark De Jonge

Rule 1. Original data should be presented in a way that will preserve the evidence in the original data for all the predictions assumed to be useful. — Walter A. Shewhart

A plan is an example of what could happen, not a prediction of what will happen. — Kent Beck

I've been around since I was 19, I won the Oscar when I was 21, I've had a couple of TV series. I've continued to work despite the predictions of some naysayers. — Marlee Matlin

In all probability, the man who found the horoscope would also catch Nut and Nutcracker. They had to believe all the more strongly in the astrologer's new forecast since none of his predictions had ever come true. Sooner or later, his prognoses had to be right, given that the king, who could never be wrong, had made him his Grand Augur. — E.T.A. Hoffmann

It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future. — Niels Bohr

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be. — Anthony Goldbloom

The aeroplane is tragically unsuited for ocean service. — Hugo Eckener

The autonomy of her artificial intelligence had surpassed even my wildest predictions. — Folco Chevallier

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It's quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job-tomorrow-in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It's so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We're talking just 10 or 20 million a year-dollars or pounds-which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it's a difficult argument to win. — Julia Slingo

A prediction is a prediction because it's predictable. — Robert Kiyosaki

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded. — Carol Berg

Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. — Mark R. Levin

Al Gore is producing enough hot air to make his doomsday predictions about global warming a self-fulfilling prophecy. — Joseph Farah

The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest. — Bill Nye

As the Olympic torch neared Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980, signaling the opening of that year's Winter Olympics, newspapers and magazines throughout the world offered predictions on who would win medals in the major sports. Not a single publication gave the American men's hockey team a chance against the world powers. — Don Yaeger

The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten; the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy. — Norman Mailer

Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves. — Nate Silver

Science is one of a handful of things that defines us as a very special species. It is amazing how far we have been able to get and how accurate our predictions are. I think understanding how the universe was born is very important. It really gives us a perspective on many things. — Yuri Milner

Of the properties of mathematics, as a language, the most peculiar one is that by playing formal games with an input mathematical text, one can get an output text which seemingly carries new knowledge. The basic examples are furnished by scientific or technological calculations: general laws plus initial conditions produce predictions, often only after time-consuming and computer-aided work. One can say that the input contains an implicit knowledge which is thereby made explicit. — Yuri Manin

Your guess [about the future of technology] is as good as mine. The only thing I'm sure of is (a) most of the predictions I hear are almost certainly wrong, and (b) the things that will turn out to be important will come as a surprise, even though in hindsight they'll seem perfectly obvious. — Steve Krug

When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another. This is why many
people object to having their fortunes told: not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions would be horrible, but simply that the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it. — Alan W. Watts

The more interviews that an expert had done with the press, Tetlock found, the worse his predictions tended to be. — Nate Silver

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia. — Dionysius Lardner

I don't read, much less follow, the valuations or predictions. I study the numbers. — John Neff

Science is prediction, not explanation. — Fred Hoyle

You can't make money with a consensus accurate prediction — Bill Gurley

People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things and I tell them my only real prediction is that is it's all changing. Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren't the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing. — Neil Gaiman

But Amanda ... " Jadina said, looking past Maylin at the young Fate. "She doesn't ask for anything. She doesn't even try to read the future, it's just there. She ends up blurting things out. Starts talking about the car accident you're going to have in three years, or your baby boy dying in child birth in a few months, or your grandmother's funeral next year. Thing's you can't change even if you know about them. Things you're happier not knowing about. People go through life, happily oblivious. If you start telling them all the horrible things that are coming, they get upset. When those horrible things start coming true, they get scared and blame you. They say you caused it. Label you witch. Even burn you at the stake. She's safer in there. — Crissy Moss

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France. — Robert H. Frank

Astrologers were greatly impressed, and misled, by what they believed to be confirming evidence-so much so that they were quite unimpressed by any unfavorable evidence. Moreover, by making their interpretations and prophecies sufficiently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophecies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer's trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable. — Karl Popper

Prediction is difficult- particularly when it involves the future. — Mark Twain

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance. — Nate Silver

Fear clouds our convictions and distorts our discernment. When we fill our minds with negative predictions or allow our thoughts to manipulate us into thinking about all the possible destructive outcomes of our mission, we invite fear to paralyze our progress. — Kris Vallotton

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn't make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they'd just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain's anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew? The best social manipulator on Earth might not know what neurons were, and neither might the best Legilimens. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Nonsense," said the witcher. "And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme. — Andrzej Sapkowski

My sister lived in the moment. She said she would love the summer only when it came and warmed her. But I lived and still live in the future. Where it's warm when it's cold. Where dreams are not yet reality. Where the sad people are happy. The only problem with living in the future is that everyone has died, including yourself. So your plans are fiction and your predictions are fantasy. Living in the future is pure fantasy. I think that's why I love it so dearly. — F.K. Preston

This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it. — John B. S. Haldane

We must prove our predictions about the future with action. — George Jackson

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur. — Jack Welch

History is guided by leaders in turn affected by the sentiments of their population. Such sentiments are cyclical, allowing for predictions of a nation's fall. — Will Slatyer

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well. — Charlie Munger

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy. — Brian Greene

I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data. — Leonard Mlodinow

While I remain troubled by the Corps' inability to fully justify the Model they used for their commercial traffic predictions, America clearly has an aging lock and dam infrastructure on the Mississippi. — Ron Kind

People shouldn't be forced to categorize themselves as "gay," "straight," or "bi." People are just people. Maybe you're mostly attracted to men. Maybe you're mostly attracted to women. Maybe you're attracted to everyone. These are historical claims - not future predictions. If we truly want to expand the scope of human freedom, we should encourage people to date who they want; not just provide more categorical boxes for them to slot themselves into. A man who has mostly dated men should be just as welcome to date women as a woman who's mostly dated men.
So that's why I'm not gay. I hook up with people. I enjoy it. Sometimes they're men, sometimes they're women. I don't see why it needs to be any more complicated than that. — Aaron Swartz

Tetlock's words, even when their predictions prove — Steven D. Levitt

Hey Circe, how come your horoscope predictions are never that a hot girl is gonna fall madly in love with me forever and ever?"
"Uh, cause you're a dork Seth!" She taunted.
"Oh yeah," Seth said happily smiling at her. "That explains the devastating loneliness and constant abuse by alpha males ... — Charlie Fey

The one prediction that never comes true is, 'You'll thank me for telling you this. — Judith Martin

In making these predictions, I have had the invaluable assistance of scientists who graciously allowed me to interview them, broadcast their ideas on national radio, and even take a TV crew into their laboratories. — Michio Kaku

I have been a biologist for a long time, and I hope I never stop getting shivers in my spine when I think about the beauty of how we come to know things in biology. Biologists make predictions, then they go out into the field or the lab to see if their predictions hold up. When hundreds of predictions of this sort are fulfilled, a theory reaches the point where it becomes certain, at least on a broad level. And that is where we are with evolution. — Darrel R. Falk

Babson became a sought-after public speaker, and the newspapers reported his predictions as newsworthy events. — Walter Friedman

Management is prediction. — W. Edwards Deming

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source,tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future. — Rob Brezsny

Enlightened spirit of the age is not the principal of life but a mirror that lets us see life through it's view. — Auliq Ice

The study of everything that stands connected with the death of Christ, whether it be in the types of the ceremonial law, the predictions of the prophets, the narratives of the gospels, the doctrines of the epistles, or the sublime vision of the Apocalypse, this is the food of the soul, the manna from heaven, the bread of life. This is "meat indeed" and "drink indeed. — John Angell James

In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth (as best one can judge from official national accounts data) show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, or Sweden. In other words, the reduction of top marginal income tax rates and the rise of top incomes do not seem to have stimulated productivity (contrary to the predictions of supply-side theory) or at any rate did not stimulate productivity enough to be statistically detectable at the macro level. — Thomas Piketty

Whenever people have used religious documents to make accurate predictions about our base knowledge of the physical world, they have been famously wrong. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing. — David Douglass

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

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

Mobile use is growing faster than all of Google's internal predictions. — Eric Schmidt

I've ceased making predictions on things because we'll see how they turn out. — David Plouffe

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced,they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed. — Cordelia Fine

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest. — Alan Cox

My biggest prediction for the future is that people are going to start looking after individual investors. — John C. Bogle

Prediction is very hard, particularly when it's about the future. — Yogi Berra

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions. — Wilbur Wright

Music is no longer tasted it is swallowed. — Jules Verne

It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister — Margaret Thatcher

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions - the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or — Steven Pinker

Reckless predictions of the second coming of Christ create an artificial excitement among believers followed by a corresponding depression. In addition, it hardens skeptics in their unbelief and provides new fodder for cynics to mock the Christian faith. — Doug Batchelor

Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explored these so-called expert predictions in a landmark twenty-year study, which he published in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? — Daniel Kahneman

Was it - was she making a real prediction?'
Dumbledore looked mildly impressed.
'Do you know, Harry, I think she might have been,' he said thoughtfully. 'Who'd have thought it? That brings her total of real predictions up to two. I should offer her a pay raise ... — J.K. Rowling

Berkshireis in the business of making easy predictions If a deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it. — Charlie Munger

I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. — Murray Gell-Mann

Weather abroad
and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction. — Adrienne Rich

Paranormal phenomena such as apports, prediction, telepathy, dowsing and the like can be explained by an extended physics as potentially real effects. — Ron Pearson

The aeroplane will never fly. — Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane

Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine. — Paul Wellstone

This explains so much," she said, clucking her tongue in mother-hen fashion. "You're compensating for this withered appendage."
Withered appendage? What the devil was she talking about? He shook his head, trying to clear it. Colin's dire predictions of shriveled twigs and dried currants rattled in his skull. Wide awake now, he fought to sit up, wrestling the sheets.
"Listen, you. I don't know what sort of liberties you've taken while I was insensible, or just what your spinster imagination prepared you to see. But I'll have you know, that water was damned cold."
She blinked at him. "I'm referring to your leg."
"Oh." His leg. That withered appendage — Tessa Dare

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action. — W. Edwards Deming

Never be paralyzed by your fears of a future that no one can foretell, even if predictions lead you to the seemingly obvious, and often disparaging, conclusions. That — R.A. Salvatore

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth. — Stephen Jay Gould

In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984. — Aldous Huxley