Probability Quotes - Page 17

• The probability of having some problem with the children is greater when the mother is over the age of 35 but I've never heard anyone suggest that anyone over the age of 35 shouldn't be allowed to have sex.

  Jamie Whyte

  Mother, Sex, Children

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• Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that.

  Steven Chu

  Sea, Three, Levels

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• Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Odds, Alternatives, Outcomes

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007). “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets”, p.224, Penguin UK

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• I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you’re bent over about the color, don’t leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want.

  Janet Evanovich

  Mean, Math, Probability Theory

  Janet Evanovich (2010). “Hard Eight: A Stephanie Plum Novel”, p.113, Macmillan

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• If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.

  J. D. Salinger

  Death, Glasses, Ifs

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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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• There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

  Lin Yutang

  Philosophy, Loss, Medicine

  Lin Yutang (2013). “Lin Yutang - The Importance Of Living”, p.73, Read Books Ltd

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• Anyone who dares to speak about an aether is regarded as an ignorant and backward mind and he can only lose his credibility in scientific circles, although in reality those who criticize him use the same concept of intermediate medium in other words, whether it be fields, an associated fluid, a probability fluid, a pilot fluid, a quantum fluid, etc.

  Maurice Allais

  Reality, Circles, Ignorant

  "L'anisotropie de l'espace. La nécessaire révision de certains postulats des théories contemporaines. Les données de l'expérience" by Maurice Allais, Clément Juglar, Paris, (p. 506), 1997.

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• There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Space, May, Way

  "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit, medium.com. July 8, 2014.

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• The risk of a business being hit by a low probability, high impact event is far higher than most boards realize because the number of potential wild cards is so great.

  Patrick Dixon

  Impact, Numbers, Risk

  "Futurewise". Book by David Perkins, 1998.

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• Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system.

  Richard Arnold Epstein

  Wagers, Resources, Betting

  "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Revised Edition". Book by Richard Arnold Epstein, Chapter Three, Fundamental Principles Of A Theory Of Gambling, 1977.

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• If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization.

  Jim Highsmith

  Organization, Decision, Risk

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• There is a much higher probability that a first-class scholar should commit an error than that an author who usually writes nonsense should have one good idea.

  Otto E. Neugebauer

  Writing, Should Have, Class

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• ...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.

  James Hansen

  Energy, Degrees, World

  'FRONTLINE' Transcript, www.pbs.org.

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• In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

  Steven Pinker

  School, College, Intuition

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• Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Taken, Animal, Average

  "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money". Book by John Maynard Keynes, book 4, chapter 12, section 7, p. 161, February, 1936.

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• First get a clear notion of what you desire to accomplish and then in all probability you will succeed in doing it.

  Henry Maudslay

  Success, Science, Accomplishment

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• My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

  Bill Bryson

  Science, Work Out, Royal

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• I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

  Walter Sutton

  Science, Law, Attention

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• It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness.

  Carl Jung

  Self, Two, Special

  "Psychology and religion: West and East".

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