Probabilistic Quotes & Sayings

There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong. — Alan Greenspan

Sociologically, large groups of people don't generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously. — Rob Bell

Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes. — Barry Ritholtz

There's something very enticing about an empty bench under a tree. And if it's facing a river, that's the bench for me. — Joyce Rachelle

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms. — Michael Lewis

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer] — Michael Lewis

Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives. — Leonard Mlodinow

Classical mechanics gave us a deterministic view of the world. Quantum mechanics, conversely, gives us a probabilistic view instead. According to Newton, if you know the cause af an event, you can predict the outcome. According to M.Born, you can only predict how likely that outcome will be. — Leonid V. Azaroff

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions. — John Harsanyi

So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy. — James Gleick

What both paradoxes show is that decisions based on probabilistic arguments are not logical decisions. Logic and probabilistic arguments are incompatible... Jerry Cornfield justified the findings that smoking causes lung cancer by appealing to a piling up of evidence, where study after study shows results that are highly improbable unless you assume that smoking is the cause of the cancer. Is it illogical to believe that smoking causes cancer? — David Salsburg

Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected. — Michael Lewis

The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed - such a probabilistic, uncertain world. — Albert Ellis

Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking. — Daniel Levitin

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic. — Brian Greene

For many activities, people cannot rely solely on themselves in evaluating their ability level because such judgments require inferences from probabilistic indicants of talent about which they may have limited knowledge. Self-appraisals are, therefore, partly based on the opinions of others who presumably possess evaluative competence — Albert Bandura

We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine. — George Harrison

When we can commit a crime, we can also trigger debate. Cases go to courts. Media start covering the cases. But once you build smart environments where, if you meet a certain probabilistic profile, you won't even be allowed to board a bus, let alone commit a crime, we're perpetuating existing laws so they face no challenges or revision. — Evgeny Morozov

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. — Aldous Huxley

In the froth, space doesn't have a definite structure. It has various probabilities for different shapes and curvatures. It might have a 50 percent chance of being in one shape, a 10 percent chance of being in another, and a 40 percent chance of being in a third form. Because any structure is possible inside the singularity, we say the singularity is constructed from probabilistic foam, or quantum foam. Quantum gravity governs the probabilities for the various foam structures. — Clifford A. Pickover

What you are searching for with love, life will give you. — Debasish Mridha

...the mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Remember in Galatians, for instance, how exasperated and angry he is. That's an expression of love as well, because he loves them enough to correct the church's acceptance of heresy. — Matt Chandler

Similar probabilistic models have become central to economics, sociology, psychology, political science and the other social and natural sciences. — Yuval Noah Harari

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. — Sam Kean

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world. — Paul Gibbons