Ratio Quotes - page 5
... our confidence in foretelling and influencing events increases in inverse ratio to our ability to do so. The farther we go from ourselves and from the present, the less we sense the probabilities, and it is easy for us to be "dead certain" about things we cannot possibly know anything about.**The Rules of Chaos (1969), p 23,24.
Stephen Vizinczey
He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter.
Richard Francis Burton
Over a period of 500 years the City has supported deregulation at every turn. The consequences of this are massive. You had fraudulent products – the cause of the crash – debt being repackaged as an asset and then being used as leverage. The assets they held and credit they generated were on a ratio of 50-1. There was no effective regulation of this, no effective oversight. They have been exposed by the bailout. They have refused more than ten years of requests from us [London Citizens UK organisation] and suddenly they agree to meet. I think they are concerned that the political parties will move to a more manufacturing, less financially-based economy.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
A distinguished writer (Siméon Denis Poisson) has thus stated the fundamental definitions of the science:
:"The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will take place."
:"The measure of the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favourable to that event, to the total number of cases favourable or contrary, and all equally possible" (equally like to happen).
From these definitions it follows that the word probability, in its mathematical acceptation, has reference to the state of our knowledge of the circumstances under which an event may happen or fail. With the degree of information which we possess concerning the circumstances of an event, the reason we have to think that it will occur, or, to use a single term, our expectation of it, will vary.
George Boole
Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.
William Gibson
A great surgeon performs operations for stone by a single method; later he makes a statistical summary of deaths and recoveries, and he concludes from these statistics that the mortality law for this operation is two out of five. Well, I say that this ratio means literally nothing scientifically and gives us no certainty in performing the next operation; for we do not know whether the next case will be among the recoveries or the deaths. What really should be done, instead of gathering facts empirically, is to study them more accurately, each in its special determinism....to discover in them the cause of mortal accidents so as to master the cause and avoid the accidents.
Claude Bernard
Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty', I don't mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.
Donald Schön
Cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.
Daniel Goleman
Getting to near zero marginal cost and nearly free goods and services is a function of advances in productivity. Productivity is "a measure of productive efficiency calculated as the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it.” If the cost of producing an additional good or service is nearly zero, that would be the optimum level of productivity.
Jeremy Rifkin
Christianity, for Blake, bled from Jesus his real substance as prophet/poet. Reason, or Ratio, on the other side, born with the scientific revolution, divided the world from the self, the human from the natural, the inside from the outside, and the outside itself into ever finer degrees of manipulable parts.
Curtis White
It is some improvement that for married couples – or male-female couples in general – the fertility indicator expressing the nation's demographic situation has risen from 1.2 to 1.44, and this is promising, but 1.44 is still very far from 2. In order to feel safe demographically, the average statistical ratio of children to Hungarian couples should be 2.1. In practice this is hard to implement, but this is the average figure we should have. Until we reach that point, Hungarians must be seen as an endangered species demographically; and the people – but the Government above all – should understand the imperative which is implicit in this.
Viktor Orbán
Even trifles are most important when they concern the rulers, as was the case of old at Syracuse; for the Syracusan constitution was once changed by a love-quarrel of two young men, who were in the government. The story is that while one of them was away from home his beloved was gained over by his companion, and he to revenge himself seduced the other's wife. They then drew the members of the ruling class into their quarrel and so split all the people into portions. We learn from this story that we should be on our guard against the beginnings of such evils, and should put an end to the quarrels of chiefs and mighty men. The mistake lies in the beginning - as the proverb says - 'Well begun is half done'; so an error at the beginning, though quite small, bears the same ratio to the errors in the other parts.
Aristotle
