Probabilistic Thinking Quotes

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

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.

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are not known, Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. But people are very often willing to make intuitive diagnoses even when they're very likely to be wrong.

A physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes.

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

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

One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it.

Spreading out the particle into a string is a step in the direction of making everything we're familiar with fuzzy. You enter a completely new world where things aren't at all what you're used to.

Throughout his remarkable business and government career, Robert Rubin, now 65, has both worked exhaustively at reaching well-founded conclusions and rejected the idea that anything - and he means anything - can be a 'provable certainty.'

The grand assertion is that you must see the world through probability and that probability is the only guide you need.

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