Quotes from Gary Smith

I'm a genius! Geniuses don't NEED medication!

During the dot-com bubble, most people did not use a persuasive theory to gauge whether stock prices were too high, too low, or just right. Instead, as they watched stock prices go up, they invented explanations to rationalize what was happening. They talked about Moore's Law, smart kids, and Alan Greenspan. Data without theory.

It is true that the church must be in many places and with many people, but it is the poor who will reveal to the church—dramatically and poignantly—the nature of its heart and mission.

Our inherited desire to explain what we see fuels two kinds of cognitive errors. First, we are too easily seduced by patterns and by the theories that explain them. Second, we latch onto data that support our theories and discount contradicting evidence. We believe stories simply because they are consistent with the patterns we observe and, once we have a story, we are reluctant to let it go.

Kahneman later wrote: This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.

We encounter regression to the mean almost every day of our lives. We should try to anticipate it, recognize it, and not be fooled by it.

Ronald Coase cynically observed that, "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

When a theory is generated by ransacking data, we can't use these pillaged data to test the theory.

There are few statistical facts more interesting than regression to the mean for two reasons. First, people encounter it almost every day of their lives. Second, almost nobody understands it.

In carpentry, they say, "Measure twice, cut once." With data, "Think twice, calculate once.

Finding a historical correlation between gold and silver prices is no more convincing than finding a historical correlation between marriage and beer consumption. All it demonstrates is that we looked long enough to find a correlation.

Be doubly skeptical of graphs that have two vertical axes and omit zero from either or both axes.

Everything I know I learned from my cat: When you're hungry, eat. When you're tired, nap in a sunbeam. When you go to the vet's, pee on your owner.