Hugh Howey Quotes

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

Probability is the very guide of life.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction.

I never predict anything, and I never will.

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

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.

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

A thousand probabilities don't make one fact.

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

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.

It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

I deal in facts, not forecasting the future. That's crystal ball stuff. That doesn't work.

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?

Statistics may be defined as "a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.

I've never been able to predict the future of anything.

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.