John Haigh - Collected Quotes

"All this, though, is to miss the point of gambling, which is to accept the imbalance of chance in general yet deny it for the here and now. Individually we know, with absolute certainty, that 'the way things hap pen' and what actually happens to us are as different as sociology and poetry." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"As so often happens in mathematics, a convenient re-statement of a problem brings us suddenly up against the deepest questions of knowledge." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"But despite their frequently good intuition, many people go wrong in two places in particular. The first is in appreciating the real differences in magnitude that arise with rare events. If a chance is expressed as 'one in a thousand' or 'one in a million', the only message registered maybe that the chance is remote and yet one figure is a thousand times bigger than the other. Another area is in using partial information […]" (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"It is the same with the numbers generated by roulette: the smoothness of probability in the long term allows any amount of local lumpiness on which to exercise our obsession with pattern. As the sequence of data lengthens, the relative proportions of odd or even, red or black, do indeed approach closer and closer to the 50-50 ratio predicted by probability, but the absolute discrepancy between one and the other will increase." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"Normal is safe; normal is central; normal is unexceptional. Yet it also means the pattern from which all others are drawn, the standard against which we measure the healthy specimen. In its simplest statistical form, normality is represented by the mean (often called the 'average') of a group of measurements." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"Probability therefore is a kind of corrective lens, allowing us, through an understanding of the nature of Chance, to refine our conclusions and approximate, if not achieve, the perfection of Design." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"The psychology of gambling includes both a conviction that the unusual must happen and a refusal to believe in it when it does. We are caught by the confusing nature of the long run; just as the imperturbable ocean seen from space will actually combine hurricanes and dead calms, so the same action, repeated over time, can show wide deviations from its normal expected results - deviations that do not themselves break the laws of probability. In fact, they have probabilities of their own." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"These so-called stochastic processes show up everywhere randomness is applied to the output of another random function. They provide, for instance, a method for describing the chance component of financial markets: not every value of the Dow is possible every day; the range of chance fluctuation centers on the opening price. Similarly, shuffling takes the output of the previous shuffle as its input. So, if you’re handed a deck in a given order, how much shuffling does it need to be truly random?" (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"This notion of 'being due' - what is sometimes called the gambler’s fallacy - is a mistake we make because we cannot help it. The problem with life is that we have to live it from the beginning, but it makes sense only when seen from the end. As a result, our whole experience is one of coming to provisional conclusions based on insufficient evidence: read ing the signs, gauging the odds." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"We search for certainty and call what we find destiny. Everything is possible, yet only one thing happens - we live and die between these two poles, under the rule of probability. We prefer, though, to call it Chance: an old familiar embodied in gods and demons, harnessed in charms and rituals. We remind one another of fortune’s fickleness, each secretly believing himself exempt. I am master of my fate; you are dicing with danger; he is living in a fool’s paradise." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)

"Winning and losing is not simply a pastime; it is the model science uses to explore the universe. Flipping a coin or rolling a die is really asking a question: success or failure can be defined as getting a yes or no. So the distribution of probabilities in a game of chance is the same as that in any repeated test - even though the result of any one test is unpredictable." (John Haigh," Taking Chances: Winning With Probability", 1999)