Best 98 quotes in «probability quotes» category

Further, the same Arguments which explode the Notion of Luck, may, on the other side, be useful in some Cases to establish a due comparison between Chance and Design: We may imagine Chance and Design to be, as it were, in Competition with each other, for the production of some sorts of Events, and many calculate what Probability there is, that those Events should be rather be owing to the one than to the other.

He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.

Hard work increases the probability of serendipity.

He who jumps for the sake of jumping will probably keep jumping until he jumps back into his own jumping ground.

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.

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.

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

I don't simply create probabilities, I guide them.

If skeptic can weakly force E, then he can force E.

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.

Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, the impossible is just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.

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.

It is not the absolute degree of probability that matters, only its relative probability compared with other possible alternatives. It is the simple suggestion that the only valid reason for rejecting a statistical hypothesis is that some alternative explains the observed events with a greater degree of probability.

It’s like winning a lottery. Although the odds are astronomical, most weeks, someone hits the jackpot.

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification. Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth

​It's Hard, Not to Fail, but, there is Always a Chance of Success. Of course, there is No Chance of Success, if You didn't Try.

Most things are never meant. - Going, Going

Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.

On Improbability: There's an infinite number of things that can go wrong but only a finite number of things that can go right. In the infinitude of unlikely events many will happen with unnerving frequency. Tautology: A given improbable event isn't likely to happen. Corollary: Shit happens, but you'll not know its ilk. I'm certain that nothing is certain.

One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that is the right word – of the Problem of Evil; the fact that it is not unreasonable to place a substantial probability on the hypothesis that a future theory will fix those values; and the sheer incoherence of computations of the ‘chances’ of fine-tuning were there no fine-tuner.

One should not inquire too closely where ancient legends about the gods are concerned; many things which reason rejects acquire some color of probability once you bring a god into the story

Peace shouldn't be an option, it must be the objective, peace shouldn't be a possibility, it must be the purpose.

Only someone who isn’t a fool stands a chance of not being bothered by being deemed a fool by a fool.

People’s emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.)

People play the lottery all the time unaware of how mind-bogglingly difficult it is to win. It seems like they take a different approach to probabilities. Their rationale must be, “Well, I can either win it or not win it, so my odds of winning are 50/50.

Playing is more than the act of judging the possibility of defeat or victory, playing is the probability of hope we will have victory.

Possibilities are hope in numbers. Even the most certain statement - your dinner at 7 pm - may not happen because many things can influence the change of events. What is taken for sure will score the highest likelihood, but never the certitude because the world runs on probabilities. Like a game.

Predictability is not how things will go, but how they can go.

Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819

Probability of helping someone with your tongue is low

Promise has 50% chance of happening. At least always make 2 promises at once.

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.

Sometimes I feel someone is playing with my life. But then I realize it’s probably just me, playing with myself.

Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't.

Stop living the life with possibilities and probabilities, live the life with certainties.

So the probability I'm not there..., but you want I to be there opps so sorry I can't be but you can make a discussion with my books and if you want more just P.M. - That's how it works and It will work.

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.

The combination of Bayes and Markov Chain Monte Carlo has been called "arguably the most powerful mechanism ever created for processing data and knowledge." Almost instantaneously MCMC and Gibbs sampling changed statisticians' entire method of attacking problems. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, it was a paradigm shift. MCMC solved real problems, used computer algorithms instead of theorems, and led statisticians and scientists into a worked where "exact" meant "simulated" and repetitive computer operations replaced mathematical equations. It was a quantum leap in statistics.

The Coin of Life example: Say you have a coin with heads on one side and tails on the other side. One side would mean good and the other bad, based on your interpretation or bet of which side of the coin represents a win for you. However, you can't decide the outcome and the coin flips many times throughout your life. Finding balance is flipping the coin in such a way that neither of the sides is of greater importance to you, but if the coin lands on the middle bit, you realize that the space between what you consider good or bad is so small and the probability of landing there is also incredibly small without continuous practice. However, no matter the outcome, you choose to accept the coin as it is, with both sides, and appreciate the importance of both in your life. For the coin of life has meaning and value no matter what side it lands on. It's each individual's choice whether to bet on the outcome or not, but ultimately your coin of life will be spent somehow.

The fact that you have just buried your parent or parents and/or sibling or siblings does not make you less likely to die today.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

The greatest risk is not taking any.

The greatest risk is not taking one.

The more energy taken, the less energy that is left for us to implement our goals and the smaller the probability of realization of our innate potential

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.

Time did exist here, in small amounts (well some of the time) – and there were feint eddies and currents of time here, things that were barely tangible. Feint forces of the universe they were, nearly indiscernible from the nothingness like a warm breeze on a hot summer night. How long he had been here, he knew not – but he was slowly learning to master these barely tangible waves like a new surfer with one foot on the sandy beach and the other on a shiny new board of Hatred. Revenge splashed around his feet like the cold waves of the ocean of Time. Nearby, two other inmates collided with each other, bounced apart spread-eagled and spiraled off into the distance in infinite slowness. The Wetsuit of Insanity clung to his spiritual body, isolating him from the timelessness that seemed to exist here. A wind of Change blew at him from behind and he pushed off from the beach with iron determination and a mental clarity hereto before unknown to him. Something in the microcosm that didn’t even have a name went ‘bling’ and against all the laws of probability, Brad Xyl opened his eyes.

The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place. The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible.

There’s no such thing as probability," she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do.

The wave quality of light is the same as that of the electron. The wave determines the probable location of the photon of light when it is detected. The wave character of light is not vibrating stuff like a wave of water but rather a wavelike function encoding information about where you'll find the photon of light once it is detected. Until it reaches the detector plate, like the electron, it is seemingly passing through both slits simultaneously, making its mind up about its location only once it is observed [...]. It's this act of observation that is such a strange feature of quantum physics. Until I ask the detector to pick up where the electron is, the particle should be thought of as probabilistically distributed over space, with a probability described by a mathematical function that has wavelike characteristics. The effect of the two slits on this mathematical wave function alters it in such a way that the electron is forbidden from being located at some points on the detector plate. But when the particle is observed, the die is cast, probabilities disappear, and the particle must decide on a location.