Probability Quotes

“The concept of randomness and coincidence will be obsolete when people can finally define a formulation of patterned interaction between all things within the universe.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened,the impossibleis just a blind spot that dissolves if we move our heads fast enough. History seems to show that the impossible is probably the most likely thing of all.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Knowing how to manage probability and uncertainty in a profitable way is a great skill to have in business.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.”
― Adam-Troy Castro, Alien Contact

“AI detects every probable event. Media or justice interpret with prejudice or interests not truth. They create false realities remotely abusing targets to make it seem like the targets did what they plotted. You congratulate criminals!”
― Maria Karvouni, You Are Always Innocent

“Probability is a light darted on the object, from the proofs, which for this reason are pertinently enough styled evidence. Plausibility is a native lustre issuing directly from the object. The former is the aim of the historian, the latter of the poet.”
― George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“And thus, by combining the uncertainty of chance with the force of mathematical proof and by the reconciliation of two apparent opposites, she derives her name from both of them and rightfully assumes the wonderful name of Mathematics of Chance!”
― Blaise Pascal

“A more serious consequence of the illusion of control is revealed in our preference for driving over flying. At least part of this irrational—from a survival point of view—habit is due to the fact that we “feel in control” when driving, but not when flying. The probability of dying in a cross-country flight is approximately equal to the probability of dying in a 12-mile drive— in many cases, the most dangerous part of the trip is over when you reach the airport (Sivak & Flannagan, 2003). Gerd Gigerenzer (2006) estimates that the post-9/11 shift from flying to driving in the United States resulted in an additional 1,500 deaths, beyond the original 3,000 immediate victims of the terrorist attacks.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“We must work towards possibility, not probability!”
― Akshay Kulkarni

“As with the “You can prove anything with statistics” claim, I usually find that the people making these other irrational claims don’t even quite mean what they say, and their own choices will betray their stated beliefs. If you ask someone to enter a betting pool to guess the outcome of the number of heads in 12 coin tosses, even the person who claims odds can’t be assigned will prefer the numbers around or near six heads. The person who claims to accept no risk at all will still fly to Moscow using Aeroflot (an airline with a safety record worse than any U.S. carrier) to pick up a $1 million prize.

In response to the skeptics of statistical models he met in his own profession, Paul Meehl proposed a variation on the game of Russian roulette.15 In his modified version there are two revolvers: one with one bullet and five empty chambers and one with five bullets and one empty chamber. Meehl then asks us to imagine that he is a “sadistic decision-theorist” running experiments in a detention camp. Meehl asks, “Which revolver would you choose under these circumstances? Whatever may be the detailed, rigorous, logical reconstruction of your reasoning processes, can you honestly say that you would let me pick the gun or that you would flip a coin to decide between them?

Meehl summarized the responses: “I have asked quite a few persons this question, and I have not yet encountered anybody who alleged that he would just as soon play his single game of Russian roulette with the five-shell weapon.” Clearly, those who answered Meehl’s question didn’t really think probabilities were meaningless. As we shall see before the end of this chapter, Meehl’s hypothetical game is less “hypothetical” than you might think.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

“Also, I named the algorithm I presented in the paper BAyesian Clustering Over Networks, also known as BACON, so I have that going for me.”
― Brian Godsey, Think Like a Data Scientist: Tackle the data science process step-by-step

“There is no such thing as randomness. No one who could detect every force operating on a pair of dice would ever play dice games, because there would never be any doubt about the outcome. The randomness, such as it is, applies to our ignorance of the possible outcomes. It doesn’t apply to the outcomes themselves. They are 100% determined and are not random in the slightest. Scientists have become so confused by this that they now imagine that things really do happen randomly, i.e. for no reason at all.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated..... It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or" risk "proper.... is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.”
― Frank Hyneman Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit

“I always adore to be on the verge of endless probabilities.”
― Shubham Sanap

“explore the similarities and differences between your views and those of others—and pay special attention to prediction markets and other Methods of extracting wisdom from crowds. Synthesize all these different views into a single vision as acute as that of a dragonfly. Finally, express your judgment as precisely as you can, using a finely grained scale of probability.”
― Philip E. Tetlock, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

“Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“Perhaps the fundamental precept of probabilistic analysis is the exhortation to take a bird’s-eye, distributional view of the situation under analysis (e.g., a dice game, the traffic in Boulder, crimes in Pittsburgh, the situation with that troublesome knee) and to define a sample space of all the possible events and their logical, set membership interrelations. This step is exactly where rational analysis and judgments based on availability, similarity, and scenario construction diverge: When we judge intuitively, the mind is drawn to a limited, systematically skewed subset of the possible events. In the case of scenario construction, for example, we are often caught in our detailed scenario—focused on just one preposterously specific outcome path.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“There is always opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet. These are the same decisions I make during a hand of poker: fold, check, call, bet, or raise.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We need to design aircraft or automotive displays to counteract visual illusions and we need to design statistical graphics to counteract probability illusions.”
― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.

“Probability is just that: probable. Nothing is certain.”
― Holly Jackson

“No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

“Or consider another field where one can use games to implant an understanding of basic principles. All scientific thinking is in terms of probability. The old eternal verities are merely a high degree of likeliness; the immutable laws of nature are just statistical averages. How does one get these profoundly unobvious notions into children’s heads? By playing roulette with them, by spinning coins and drawing lots. By teaching them all kinds of games with cards and boards and dice.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“If I had stayed working in Florida, there is a high probability I would have died in hurricane Ian.”
― Steven Magee

“If you allow yourself to be removed from a public area by an abductor, there is a high probability you will never be seen again.”
― Steven Magee

“There is a high probability that the corporations in your area are in control of your police department.”
― Steven Magee

“You can control nothing, nothing at all.
The only thing you think you’re controlling
is your perception of the probability
and nothing else.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“Even if you turn back the clock of the whole universe, you still can't stop and evildoer from exercising his free will.”
― Bob Bello, Starcall Anthology 1

“And perhaps the sun, in search of novelty, will rise in the west.”
― David Mamet, Keep Your Pantheon (and School): Two Unrelated Plays

“The only important thing about a low probability is... It's not zero.”
― Kaitani Shinobu

“He had convinced himself of a ‘truth’, mostly because it was a very welcome sight for sore eyes. To see something meant that it was probable, and to consider something probable meant that it was believable.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Extraction