Prediction Quotes

204 Sourced quotes

If belief in the existence of God is predicted to lead to a feeling of contentment, and the prediction is fulfilled, does it follow that God exists? Surely not. All that would follow would be the desireability of the belief.

When a photographer chooses a subject, he or she is making a claim on the interest and attention of future viewers, a prediction about what will be thought to have been important.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.

I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!

Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that, after the most industrious and impartial researchers, the longest liver of you all will find no principles, institutions or systems of education more fit in general to be transmitted to your posterity than those you have received from your ancestors.

Laws serve to explain events and theories to explain laws; a good law allows us to predict new facts and a good theory new laws. At any rate, the success of prediction... adds credibility to the beliefs which led to it, and a corresponding force to the explanations they provide.

I have fortunately been proved wrong in that prediction demonstrates how far I underestimated that as science progressively developed and as its nature and attributes became more and more familiar, mankind's appreciation and acceptance of scientific progress has steadily accelerated.

Wilhelm Ostwald

Can there be laws of chance? The answer, it would seem... should be negative, since chance is in fact defined as the characteristic of the phenomena which follow no law, phenomena whose causes are too complex to permit prediction.

I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religions document.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The fact that there are rules at all to be checked is a kind of miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle. It is not understood at all, but it leads to the possibility of prediction — that means it tells you what you would expect to happen in an experiment you have not yet done.

Richard Feynman

Weather abroad
and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

The chief point we must remember is that the great and rapid advance of the physical sciences took place in fields where it proved that explanation and prediction could be based on laws which accounted for the observed phenomena as functions of comparatively few variables-either particular facts or relative frequencies of events.

Friedrich Hayek

If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous.

Malcolm Gladwell

If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable exploration of the criteria for determining what abstract model it is best to use for particular kinds of problems, what entities in the abstract model are to be identified with what observable entities, and what features of the problem or of the circumstances have the greatest effect on the accuracy of the predictions yielded by a particular model or theory.

Milton Friedman

Ask anyone today working on foundational questions in quantum theory and you are likely to hear that there is still no consensus on many of these questions—all the while, of course, everybody seems to be in perfect agreement on how to apply the quantum formalism when it comes to making experimental predictions.

Maximilian Schlosshauer

The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.

Richard Dawkins

We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must reflect unique qualities not shared by those forced to eat commercial airline food. And we place too much confidence in the overly precise predictions of people - political pundits, financial experts, business consultants - who claim a track record demonstrating expertise.

Leonard Mlodinow

The truth and value of a theory does not depend on the number of people who are interested in it — otherwise you might compare the number of people who follow the predictions of astrologers in the daily press with those who attend lectures by Einstein, and conclude that astrology was more valuable and true than physics.

Dorothy L. Sayers

One may say that predictions are dangerous particularly for the future.

Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account: "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
We didn't understand how good we could get at communication — when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it.

The usefulness of the models in constructing a testable theory of the process is severely limited by the quickly increasing number of parameters which must be estimated in order to compare the predictions of the models with empirical results.

Anatol Rapoport

The United States—and the world—has been through much worse than anything Donald Trump is going to throw at us. The incoming era may indeed turn out to be terrible, but if we all sat down and wrote out four or eight years of specific predictions, every single one of us would be wrong. And if we're wrong about almost everything, that includes most of the scary stuff.

Is object-oriented technology mature enough upon which to build industrial-strength systems? Absolutely. Does this technology scale? Indeed. Is it the sole technology worth considering? No way. Is there some better technology we should be using in the future? Possibly, but I am clueless as to what that might be.
It is dangerous to make predictions, especially in a discipline that changes so rapidly, but one thing I can say with confidence is that I have seen the future, and it is object-oriented.

I've been doing this a long time, and I've come to learn that predictions don't mean much. Too much lies outside the realm of medical knowledge. A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there's nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that's not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most of the time you have left.

Nicholas Sparks