Best 98 quotes in «probability quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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 of helping someone with your tongue is low

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

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.

The greatest risk is not taking one.

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.

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

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 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 greatest risk is not taking any.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Today is an ephemeral ghost... A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not "exist." In mundane terms, it marks a "leap" in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up! But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability... A day of unlocked potential. Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you? Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

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.

What luck has gave you will probably leave you.

We either base our 'confidence' on reason (evident probabilities, past experience, competence, etc) or we base our beliefs on faith, which is blind by definition. Faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have, because it is an assertion of stoic conviction that is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. If you have to believe it on faith, you have no reason to believe it at all.

To talk of probability is to suggest that events might happen differently from the way they do, whereas events themselves will unfold according to an inevitable path.

While most of us are comfortable acknowledging that luck plays a role in what we do, we have difficulty assessing its role after the fact. Once something has occurred and we can put together a story to explain it, it starts to seem like the outcome was predestined. Statistics don't appeal to our need to understand cause and effect, which is why they are so frequently ignored or misinterpreted. Stories, on the other hand, are a rich means to communicate precisely because they emphasize cause and effect.

What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?

You have a very high probability of your quote and your name being distributed, posted, and shared around the world!

Yet Laplace had built his probability theory on intuition. As far as he was concerned, "essentially, the theory of probability is nothing but good common sense reduced to mathematics. It provides an exact appreciation of what sound minds feel with a kind of instinct, frequently without being able to account for it.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

Digital television is no longer a probability, it is a certainty.

Embrace the probability of your imminent death....and know there is nothing i can do to save you.

A person who is psychic is following a line of probability to see a probable future; but it can change. Another causal fact will interfere and that future won't happen.

Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.

If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic.

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.

Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system.