Probability Quotes - Page 16

• In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.

  Patricia Churchland

  Brain, Levels, States

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Suggestions, Events

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

  Vera Nazarian

  Clouds, Patterns, Different

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• I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis.

  Richard Dawkins

  Zero, Views, World

  Source: inters.org

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• If you leave school at 16 then, in all probability, there is a machine that can do what you can do better and cheaper. And Trump can't do anything to change that.

  Nicholas Bloom

  School, Machines, Trump

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.

  David Eagleman

  Two, Eight, Crime

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain”, p.167, Vintage

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• There is a radical and unprecedented shift [in war] that is part of the general transformation of civilization. First, understand that the past 150 years of warfare are totally unprecedented in that we introduced a breathtakingly inefficient technology: guns. In the First World War, and this is not an exaggeration, it took 10,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one person. Any given shot had a one in 10,000 probability of ending someone's life.

  George Friedman

  War, Technology, Gun

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• In a business setting, one's intelligence is crucial. Many problems faced by today's executives are unique and ill-defined. So, one's ability to analyze information and render a decision based upon the probability of success is imperative. What it comes down to is that all the knowledge in the world is useless if one has no means of processing and applying it. Organizations run on the brainpower of their people.

  Justin Menkes

  Running, Mean, Unique

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Rome, Fossils, Causes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.34, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

  N. T. Wright

  Fall, Historical, Jerusalem

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• Do not mistake probability for truth, for it is a notorious liar.

  Robert Breault

  Truth, Mistake, Liars

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

  James Anthony Froude

  Philosophy, Doubt, Philosopher

  Short Studies on Great Subjects Calvinism (p. 51)

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• In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Helping, Desperation, Midst

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• The most important thing you can do individually and organizationally is to pay attention to your own creativity. Sports psychologists call this muscle memory or paying attention to your perfect performance. In your own life you can notice when you do something that works right for you and celebrate it. The more you do this, the greater the probability that you will act creatively in future situations.

  Michael Ray

  Sports, Memories, Creativity

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• An executive might have a very strong intuition that a given product has promise, without considering the probability that a rival is already ahead in developing the same product.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Strong, Promise, Intuition

  "Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?". Interview with Olivier Sibony and Dan Lovallo, www.mckinsey.com. March 2010.

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• Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.

  Elliott Sober

  Claims, Theory, Circumstances

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.

  Thomas Huxley

  Passion, Self, Prejudice

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• Crushed to earth and rising again is an author's gymnastic. Once he fails to struggle to his feet and grab his pen, he will contemplate a fact he should never permit himself to face: that in all probability books have been written, are being written, will be written, better than anything he has done, is doing, or will do.

  Fannie Hurst

  Perseverance, Struggle, Book

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• When a person feels disposed to over estimate his own importance, let him remember that mankind got along very well before his birth, and that in all probability they will they will get along very well after his death.

  Charles Simmons

  Birth, Remember, Importance

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• But it is necessary to insist more strongly than usual that what I am putting before you is a model-the Bohr model atom-because later I shall take you to a profounder level of representation in which the electron instead of being confined to a particular locality is distributed in a sort of probability haze all over the atom.

  Arthur Eddington

  Science, Usual, Atoms

  Arthur Eddington (2012). “New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)”, p.34, Cambridge University Press

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• Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle... Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Lying, Media, Editors

  Thomas Jefferson (1853). “The writings of Thomas Jefferson: being his autobiography, correspondence, reports, messages, addresses, and other writings, official and private”, p.92

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• The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

  Morris Kline

  Science, Reality, Order

  Morris Kline (1964). “Mathematics in Western Culture”, p.382, Oxford University Press

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• In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."

  Arthur Eddington

  Science, Verbs, Physics

  Arthur Eddington (2012). “New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)”, p.110, Cambridge University Press

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• It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Light, Evolution

  "Evolution as a Process". Book edited by J. S. Huxley, A. C. Hardy and E. B. Ford, 1954.

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• Moral certainty is never more than probability.

  Giovanni Battista Beccaria

  Science, Moral, Certainty

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