Dennis Lindley Quotes

Probability is the very guide of life.

Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

But to us, probability is the very guide of life.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.

It is not surprising that in talking about uncertainty we should lean heavily on facts, just as the court of law does when interrogating witnesses. Facts form a sort of bedrock on which we can build the shifting sands of uncertainty.

Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.

A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

Our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance.

In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.

Whatever truth you contribute to the world will be one lucky shot in a thousand misses. You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions.

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

Just let your hand drop; and let fate decide for you.

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.

The world runs on luck.

Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.

Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking.

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.