Probability Quotes - Page 18

• Thus we can get the correct answer for the probability of partial reflection by imagining (falsely) that all reflection comes from only the front and back surfaces. In this intuitively easy analysis, the 'front surface' and 'back surface' arrows are mathematical constructions that give us the right answer, whereas .... a more accurate representation of what is really going on: partial reflection is the scattering of light by electrons inside the glass.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Reflection, Arrows, Glasses

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• It is only by fidelity in little things that the grace of true love to God can be sustained, and distinguished from a passing fervor of spirit. . . . No one can well believe that our piety is sincere, when our behavior is lax and irregular in its little details. What probability is there that we should not hesitate to make the greatest sacrifices, when we shrink from the smallest?

  Francois Fenelon

  Love, Believe, Sacrifice

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• But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

  Peter Thiel

  Powerful, School, Thinking

  "Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 13 Notes Essay". blakemasters.com. May 20, 2012.

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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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• ...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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• 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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• A man must study general conditions, to seize them so as to be able to anticipate probabilities.

  Jesse Lauriston Livermore

  Men, Investing, Able

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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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• In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.

  Antony Jay

  Corporations, Possibility, Casts

  Antony Jay (1994). “Management and Machiavelli: discovering a new science of management in the timeless principles of statecraft”, Jossey-Bass

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• Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability

  Robert Kanigel

  School, Keys, Numbers

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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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• 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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• 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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• Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Prayer, People

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• Not smoking enough will cause lung cancer! If anybody is getting a cancerous activity in the lung, the probabilities are that it's radiation dosage coupled with the fact that he smokes. And what it does is start to run out the radiation dosage, don't you see.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Running, Cancer, Smoking

  Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, 35, July 19, 1961.

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• The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

  Sherwin B. Nuland

  Reality, Humanity, Dying

  Sherwin B. Nuland (1994). “How We Die”, Vintage

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• Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Struggle, Sky, Punishment

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”, p.149, Macmillan

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

  Dennis Lindley

  Needs, World, Guides

  "Understanding Uncertainty". Book by Dennis Lindley (Chapter 5 "The Rules of Probability", p. 66), 2006.

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• We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Regret, Done

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.362

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• The student who would build his knowledge on solid foundations, and proceed by just degrees to the pinnacles of truth, is directed by the great philosopher of France to begin by doubting of his own existence. In like manner, whoever would complete any arduous and intricate enterprise, should, as soon as his imagination can cool after the first blaze of hope, place before his own eyes every possible embarrassment that may retard or defeat him. He should first question the probability of success, and then endeavour to remove the objections that he has raised.

  Samuel Johnson

  Eye, Imagination, Doubt

  Samuel Johnson (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.77

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• And by letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable...you ironically increase...the probability of getting what you want.

  Michael Neill

  Letting Go, Trying, Getting What You Want

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• All the politics in the world are nothing else but a kind of analysis of the quantity of probability in casual events, and a good politician signifies no more but one who is dexterous at such calculations.

  John Arbuthnot

  Analysis, World, Politics

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• The probability of life ever evolving on Earth was slim to none. It's insane that we're all walking around and talking.

  Kesha

  Talking, Insane, Earth

  Interview with Matt Diehl, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 19, 2010.

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• What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Children, Fear, Thinking

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• One would appear ridiculous who would say, that it is only probable the sun will rise to-morrow, or that all men must die; thoughit is plain we have no further assurance of these facts than what experience affords us.

  David Hume

  Men, Experience, Sun

  David Hume (1963). “The Philosophy of David Hume”

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