Quotes from Charles Wheelan

Again, a mechanism that is supposed to transmit information has been dulled.

The belief otherwise is sometimes called "the gambler's fallacy." In fact, if you flip a fair coin 1,000,000 times and get 1,000,000 heads in a row, the probability of getting tails on the next flip is still ½. The

The credit card companies are at the forefront of this kind of analysis, both because they are privy to so much data on our spending habits and because their business model depends so heavily on finding customers who are just barely a good credit risk.

Os maiores riscos nunca são aqueles que você pode ver e mensurar, mas aqueles que você não pode ver e, portanto, jamais poderá mensurar. Aqueles que parecem tão distantes, fora das fronteiras da probabilidade normal, que você não consegue nem imaginar que possam acontecer na sua vida – mesmo que, é claro, aconteçam, com mais frequência do que você se dá conta.

So we simplify. We perform calculations that reduce a complex array of data into a handful of numbers that describe those data

Good government makes a market economy possible. Period. And bad government, or no government, dashes capitalism against the rocks, which is one reason that billions of people live in dire poverty around the globe.

Yes, the probability that five people in the same school or church or workplace will contract the same rare form of leukemia may be one in a million, but there are millions of schools and churches and workplaces

As humans, we are really bad at envisioning the counterfactual—what might have happened if different choices had been made.

one point, Leah gave CJ a tough geometry problem in our Berlin hotel room. He collapsed to the floor, where he began crying and saying repeatedly that he wanted to be a taco.

This distinction between correlation and causation is crucial to the proper interpretation of statistical results.

The mean, or average, turns out to have some problems in that regard, namely, that it is prone to distortion by "outliers," which are observations that lie farther from the center.

federal researchers cannot rule out mere chance as the cause of any variation in the performance of students who use these software products and students who do not.

If sane, pragmatic, moderate people ignore politics because they are disgusted with the outcomes, then it merely leaves a vacuum to be filled by more extreme and dishonest elements. Unlike baseball, democracy is not a spectator sport. Things won't correct themselves if you ignore them out of disgust. They will get worse. Look around.

Probability tells us that any outlier—an observation that is particularly far from the mean in one direction or the other—is likely to be followed by outcomes that are more consistent with the long-term average.

we have another statistic that also signals the "middle" of a distribution, albeit differently: the median.

For distributions without serious outliers, the median and the mean will be similar.

The central limit theorem tells us that in repeated samples, the difference between the two means will be distributed roughly as a normal distribution.

Even the most complex financial systems can thrive or fail depending on whether people believe they will thrive or fail.

My children are puppies. The police officer quickly figured out that I was trying to say that my children were lost. He was kind but not overly concerned.

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

More specifically, there was no orderly process for allowing a handful of giant troubled firms to go bankrupt in a way that would not cause the rest of the system to unravel (e.g., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG).

As former Fed governor Kevin Warsh has said, "Economics, and the conduct of monetary policy, after all, is not physics.

One fundamental difference between a poll and other forms of sampling is that the sample statistic we care about will be not a mean (e.g., 187 pounds) but rather a percentage or proportion

The standard deviation is the descriptive statistic that allows us to assign a single number to this dispersion around the mean.