Quotes from Jordan Ellenberg

It means you're best off resisting the lure of the hot new fund that made 10% over the last twelve months. Better to follow the deeply unsexy advice you're probably sick of hearing, the "eat your vegetables and take the stairs" of financial planning: instead of hunting for a magic system or an adviser with a golden touch, put your money in a big dull low-fee index fund and forget about it.

But the significance test that scientists use doesn't measure importance.

There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we're still wrong about. We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too. I'll do my best to resist that temptation. But watch me carefully.

It's an unflattering portrait of the American public. Either we are babies, unable to grasp that budget cuts will inevitably reduce funding to programs we support; or we are mulish, irrational children, who understand the math but refuse to accept it.

The average American thinks there are plenty of non-worthwhile federal programs that are wasting our money and is ready and willing to put them on the chopping block to make ends meet. The problem is, there's no consensus on which programs are the worthless ones.

One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture

I was elected to lead—not to watch the polls.

when you're working hard on a theorem you should try to prove it by day and disprove it by night.

statistically noticeable" or "statistically detectable" instead of "statistically significant"! That would be truer to the meaning of the method,

If you have before you a square whose side has length X, its area is X times X—indeed, that's why we call the operation of multiplying a number by itself squaring!