Leonard Mlodinow Quotes

The world is a bell curve. Classroom test scores, employee performance in a company or how many people really, really like you. No matter the population you're studying, they always fit neatly across the standard deviations of the famous bell curve.

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.

Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

Baseball has always been filled with negative statistics.

In Cuba, I would start the first two months hitting around .260 with three or four home runs. After the first half of the season, I would get hot, and that's when I would have my best results.

When you're hot, you're hot; when you're not, you're not.

Averages are useful because many traits, behaviors, and outcomes are distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with most results clustered around the middle and a much smaller group of outliers at the high and low ends.

The sprint is sometimes like a toss of a coin. Sometimes it's heads, and sometimes it's tails.

I go into every meeting, into every room and for every speech understanding the standard deviation, the Bell Curve. I know there are about 10-15 percent of people in the room, who say, "I've been trying to say this for years. Finally. I agree. Yes, yes, yes." I know there are about 15 percent of the people in the room who think I'm an idiot, who think I don't know what I'm talking about, who think I'm naive or I have oversimplified everything. The majority who are open to the ideal.

Remember, half the people you know are below average.

[On the Gaussian curve, remarked to Poincaré:] Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.

I'm interested in the left side of the Bell Curve.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.

The world is unpredictable.

Swimming a 50 m is like playing the pokies: you push a button, and you never know what is going come up; it may be a mixed bag.

You never know what's going to happen throughout the course of a season.

Throughout the season, you have days when you are more fortunate than others.

You can try your best and do everything right for the most part and still not get sacks, and sometimes you can get sacks that fall into your lap.

That's football. Sometimes luck swings your way and sometimes it doesn't.

You can't predict things in football because anything can happen.

You can win ten times, and then you are not able to win five times. I have to discover the reason why, and I am going to find that.

The way I have played throughout my career has been sporadic.

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