Probability Quotes
-
The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.
-
In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.
-
I think in our lifetime there is a probability that one of these weapons is going to go off in New York or Washington or some big city like that. The CIA needs to be doing everything it possibly can to penetrate terrorist cells and outlaw states.
-
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.
-
Investing is not a natural science but rather a social science. So, it's never purely empirical; what you are trying to do is everything you possibly can to enhance your probabilities of being right more often than being wrong.
-
Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they'd have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of "likelihood" used in statistics.
-
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.
-
If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he's full of crap.
-
It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with "randomness". Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information.
-
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.
