Predictive Value Quotes

Knowlege is of no real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow ... you must be willing to stick your neck out.

Although it is uncertain, it is necessary to make science useful. Science is only useful if it tells you about some experiment that has not been done; it is not good if it only tells you what just went on.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

Events alone rarely provide much guide to the future.

IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.

While statistics are interesting, they're all in the past.

I make no effort to predict the course of general business or the stock market. Period. However, currently there are practices snowballing in the security markets and business world which, while devoid of short term predictive value, bother me as to possible long term consequences.

Part of the problem with the discovery of the so-called breast-cancer genes was that physicians wrongly told women that had the genetic changes associated with the genes that they had a 99% chance of getting breast cancer. Turns out all women that have these genetic changes don't get breast cancer.