Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

Nature gives us all, including Prof. Lorentz, surprises. It was very quickly found that there are many exceptions to the rule of splitting of the lines only into triplets.

I never predict anything, and I never will.

In the United States no trend ever arrives at its logical conclusion.

Campaigns are weird animals and innately bring out bizarre road stories.

It's a new situation. Of course, you have always the goal for years to go there and to reach the top, but then if you are there, you actually don't know what to expect.

My life is a bit unpredictable.

Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.

Critical thinking is the most important factor with chess. As it is in life, you need to think before you make decisions.

Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.

I think if you're not scared, you're not doing your job right.

I don't like to predict the fights. People can do that. They can predict my fights, but I never do that.

Professionals refer to the stages of the intelligence cycle as collection, processing, analyzing and sharing information. In most cases, the implications and significance of raw pieces of information found in classified materials are reviewed and vetted to keep sensationalized and unsubstantiated accounts from being deemed credible.

On the first flight test of any spacecraft, you're going to find surprises.

I am convinced by my style of play, so I take risks without much hesitation.

We've never been good at long-term plans.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out who's going to be a good NFL quarterback, and we do a very bad job of it. We don't really know. And we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out who will be a good teacher, and we're really bad at that too. We don't know if someone is going to be a good teacher when they start teaching. So what should we do in those situations in which predictions are useless?

Suppose it was demonstrated that one out of twenty alcoholics could learn to become a moderate social drinker. The experienced clinician would answer, 'Even if true, act as if it were false, for you will never identify that one in twenty, and in the attempt five in twenty will be ruined.' Investors should forsake the search for such tiny needles in huge haystacks.

When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars - we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.

You have a pre-conceived notion of what you want the scene to be, but once you get there, that goes out the window and it turns out to be a way that you never imagined.

When [my father] asked me to help him, I really didn't suspect the consequences.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley, And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy.

I never try to make any far-reaching predictions, so much can happen that it simply only makes you look stupid a few years later.