The Improbability Principle Quotes

“Unfortunately, we generally find it difficult to assess very small probabilities. We typically overestimate them (thinking the events more likely than they are) and underestimate very high probabilities.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“Chaos: when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“Events don’t actually occur as often as people predict they will. And this in turn is related to hindsight bias (the tendency to see past events as being more predictable than they were at the time), which I’ll discuss shortly.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“Physicists and cosmologists have explored ideas like these. For example, Fred C. Adams, of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, investigated varying the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant determining nuclear reaction rates. He found that about a quarter of all possible triples of these three values led to stars which would sustain nuclear fusion—like the stars in our universe. As he said, “[W]e conclude that universes with stars are not especially rare (contrary to previous claims).”8”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“During the 2010 FIFA football World Cup, “Paul the Octopus,” from his tank at the Sea Life Center in Oberhausen, Germany, successfully predicted the outcome of the seven matches of the German national team and the final. “Prediction” took the form of Paul picking one of two boxes, each marked with the flag of one of the competing teams, and each containing food. The probability of getting all these predictions correct is 1 in 28 = 256—so not that startling. And it’s even less startling when we take into account the law of truly large numbers. In fact, in this case, because 1 in 256 is not so small a probability, the numbers don’t even need to be “truly” large. Nonetheless, Paul’s apparent “power” made him an instant media star. He was made an honorary citizen of a town in Spain, and ambassador for England’s 2018 World Cup bid.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“A dice maker agreed with Scarne: “Once in a blue moon you might find a single store die that classes as a perfect, but the chance of finding two of them in a box of 60 and the chance that they would both be sold to the same purchaser as a pair is so small you can forget about it. It never happened.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“Although confirmation bias has become the subject of intensive study by psychologists and behavioral economists only recently, it’s been known about for centuries. In his Novum Organum (The New Organon), Francis Bacon, who was a pioneer in laying down the principles of science, said: The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects … men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by.4”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“The evolutionary usefulness of the ability to recognize patterns and then infer the causal relationships they represent is demonstrated by the fact that precisely the same development of “superstitions” occurs in animals.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“A grasp of the cause of the colors of the rainbow doesn't detract from its wonder.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“It’s the very essence of science that its conclusions can change, that is, that its truths are not absolute. The intrinsic good sense of this is contained within the remark reportedly made by the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes, responding to the criticism that he had changed his position on monetary policy during the 1930s Depression: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

“Smyth’s predictions of the date of the Second Coming, as with everyone else’s predictions of this event, have proved inaccurate.”
― David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day