Prediction Failure Quotes

Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.

Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't.

A racing tipster who only reached Hitler's level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

We did not cover ourselves with glory. We predicted the day before the war broke out that it was not going to break out.

If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

The remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939

I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would.

People may come along and argue philosophically that they like one better than another; but we have learned from much experience that all philosophical intuitions about what nature is going to do fail.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

I'm the worst at picking what movies are going to do well. I have no idea. I'm really surprised if a movie I like does well.

What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.

The internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.

The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books - mine included - because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened.

Those who claim that to leave the E.U. would damage the City are the very same as those who in the past confidently predicted, with a classic failure of understanding, that the City would be gravely damaged if the U.K. failed to adopt the euro as its currency.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

People are disappointed when the world doesn't end on their watch.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

Nostradamus, who predicted that Billy Bailey would not come home. Never got a dinner!

It's a myth that you'll know the box office result of any film. I don't think anybody can predict a film's fate accurately, otherwise nobody would make unsuccessful or flop films.

The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!

Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.