Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 6, “Three Specific Irrationalities of Probabilistic Judgment” (p. 97)
“You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.”
Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.2
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Bill Mollison 32
Australian permaculturist 1928–2016Related quotes
Source: Bryan Bryson (2021) cited in " As COVID-19 Mutates, AI Algorithms Keep Pace https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/ai-predicts-most-potent-covid-19-mutations" on IEEE Spectrum, 20 January 2021.

December 7, 1995, p. 272
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

“You have there hit the nail on the head.”
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Third Book (1546), Chapter 34.

“5185. To hit the Nail on the Head.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“You can only predict things after they’ve happened.”
Section 1, “Politics, Economics, and the Nation” Introduction (p. 7; quoting Eugene Ionesco)
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995)

Source: ZERO to ONE