Predictive Models Quotes

Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it's going to be solved by deep learning. There's going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.

The reason why China forecasting has such a poor track record is that Westerners constantly invoke the model and experience of the West to explain China, and it is a false prophet. Until we start trying to understand China on its own terms, rather than as a Western-style nation in the making, we will continue to get it wrong.

We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

Deep learning allows you to create predictive models at a level of quality and sophistication that was previously out of reach. And so deep learning also enhances the product function of data science because it can generate new product opportunities.

They're not predicting global warming based on what's happened in the past; they're basing it on what their computer predictions say, and nothing more.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

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

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

All models are false but some models are useful

We have the best mathematical economic models in the world, and just because our models have been wrong for 14 straight quarters does not mean that they will be wrong in the 15th quarter.

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.

There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.

Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.