Martin Rees Quotes

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

Events alone rarely provide much guide to the future.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

I can't speak for the future. I have no crystal ball.

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.

I can't predict the future.

We will never have 100 percent certainty except in hindsight.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

We think that computer models represent reality especially if we developed the models.

There are two kinds of economists in the world. Those who don't know the future and those who don't know that they don't know the future.