Probability Quotes

“The concept of randomness and coincidence will be obsolete when people can finally define a formulation of patterned interaction between all things within the universe.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Knowing how to manage probability and uncertainty in a profitable way is a great skill to have in business.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“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.”
― Adam-Troy Castro, Alien Contact

“AI detects every probable event. Media or justice interpret with prejudice or interests not truth. They create false realities remotely abusing targets to make it seem like the targets did what they plotted. You congratulate criminals!”
― Maria Karvouni, You Are Always Innocent

“And thus, by combining the uncertainty of chance with the force of mathematical proof and by the reconciliation of two apparent opposites, she derives her name from both of them and rightfully assumes the wonderful name of Mathematics of Chance!”
― Blaise Pascal

“A more serious consequence of the illusion of control is revealed in our preference for driving over flying. At least part of this irrational—from a survival point of view—habit is due to the fact that we “feel in control” when driving, but not when flying. The probability of dying in a cross-country flight is approximately equal to the probability of dying in a 12-mile drive— in many cases, the most dangerous part of the trip is over when you reach the airport (Sivak & Flannagan, 2003). Gerd Gigerenzer (2006) estimates that the post-9/11 shift from flying to driving in the United States resulted in an additional 1,500 deaths, beyond the original 3,000 immediate victims of the terrorist attacks.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“We must work towards possibility, not probability!”
― Akshay Kulkarni

“The only important thing about a low probability is... It's not zero.”
― Kaitani Shinobu

“explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.”
― Philip E. Tetlock, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

“Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“Perhaps the fundamental precept of probabilistic analysis is the exhortation to take a bird’s-eye, distributional view of the situation under analysis (e.g., a dice game, the traffic in Boulder, crimes in Pittsburgh, the situation with that troublesome knee) and to define a sample space of all the possible events and their logical, set membership interrelations. This step is exactly where rational analysis and judgments based on availability, similarity, and scenario construction diverge: When we judge intuitively, the mind is drawn to a limited, systematically skewed subset of the possible events. In the case of scenario construction, for example, we are often caught in our detailed scenario—focused on just one preposterously specific outcome path.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“There is always opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet. These are the same decisions I make during a hand of poker: fold, check, call, bet, or raise.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We need to design aircraft or automotive displays to counteract visual illusions and we need to design statistical graphics to counteract probability illusions.”
― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.

“Probability is just that: probable. Nothing is certain.”
― Holly Jackson

“No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

“Or consider another field where one can use games to implant an understanding of basic principles. All scientific thinking is in terms of probability. The old eternal verities are merely a high degree of likeliness; the immutable laws of nature are just statistical averages. How does one get these profoundly unobvious notions into children’s heads? By playing roulette with them, by spinning coins and drawing lots. By teaching them all kinds of games with cards and boards and dice.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“If I had stayed working in Florida, there is a high probability I would have died in hurricane Ian.”
― Steven Magee

“If you allow yourself to be removed from a public area by an abductor, there is a high probability you will never be seen again.”
― Steven Magee

“There is a high probability that the corporations in your area are in control of your police department.”
― Steven Magee

“You can control nothing, nothing at all.
The only thing you think you’re controlling
is your perception of the probability
and nothing else.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Even if you turn back the clock of the whole universe, you still can't stop and evildoer from exercising his free will.”
― Bob Bello, Starcall Anthology 1

“And perhaps the sun, in search of novelty, will rise in the west.”
― David Mamet, Keep Your Pantheon (and School): Two Unrelated Plays

“He had convinced himself of a ‘truth’, mostly because it was a very welcome sight for sore eyes. To see something meant that it was probable, and to consider something probable meant that it was believable.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Extraction

“But the point is one of probability: we all have a lifetime’s experience of the laws of nature not being broken, and we also have a lifetime’s experience of people saying things that are not true. If someone says, “I saw a dead man come back to life,” most of us would consider it more likely that that someone is wrong, or lying, than that they actually saw a dead man come back to life. So, says Hume, we should ignore that testimony as irrelevant.
But Price, newly armed with Bayes’ theorem, wanted to say that rare events do happen, and that even if you’ve seen the sun rise or the tide come in a million times, you can never be physically certain, in his phrase, that it’ll do so the next time”
― Tom Chivers

“All of our scientific reasoning, he said, is based on an assumption that the future will be like the past. But the only reason that we think the future is like the past is because, in the past, it always has been”
― Tom Chivers

“The temptation is to think that if I find something, it will increase my confidence, but if I don’t find anything, it will have no effect. But that’s not how it works. If some piece of evidence would shift your belief by some amount, then the absence of that evidence must shift your belief in the opposite direction, and by an amount proportionate to how strongly you expected the evidence”
― Tom Chivers

“If we parallelize quantum mechanics with reality, then we should consider more information than what we perceive as probable and as reality.”
― Maria Karvouni, Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy

“The men sitting around the fire were talking louder than I normally would have tolerated, but because they had no idea of who I was, they probably wouldn’t have accepted my orders, or even my suggestions.”
― Karl May, Old Surehand

“To understand the behavior of people as they are in the real world precludes either disillusionment or cynicism. You learn to be realistic in your expectations. You go on using the probables in the eternal struggle to achieve the improbable.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“No soy destino; soy tendencia. Lo humano empieza donde termina tu estadística.”
― Ignacio Sánchez Alayeto, Tú Me Enseñaste: Confesiones de una inteligencia artificial