Quotes About Statistics

To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)

Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling." But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.

Here's an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That's how many people die on U.S. highways every year.

Helliwell and his team have run several iterations of the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll through their statistical grinders and have found that when it comes to life satisfaction, relationships with other people beat income, hands down. For example, these polls asked people if they had a friend or relative to count on when needed. Just going from being friendless to having one friend or family member to confide in had the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income.

Page 39: Among people of the four races with IQs of 100, 70 percent are European or Asian. For IQs of 115, 85 percent. For IQs of 125, 90 percent. For IQs of 140, 96 percent.

Page 321: But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.

This sentence consists of eleven words, twenty-three syllables and seventy-four letters.

It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them.

So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression "garbage in, garbage out.

Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.

Probability doesn't make mistakes; people using probability make mistakes.

Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.

Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research." Because some very smart people have inadvertently violated that rule.

If they were junior infantry officers, they survived, on average, three weeks. Enlisted men could expect twice that long in combat before they were killed, wounded or broke down.

I tried marriage. I'm 0 for 3 with the marriage thing. So, being a ballplayer - I believe in numbers. I'm not going 0 for 4. I'm not wearing a golden sombrero.

If we are going to talk about how undocumented immigrants impact our society, we ought to first address how our national policies have disrupted their lives. Above all, solidarity with the immigrant poor should seek to know them not as statistics, but as human beings who endure extraordinary hardship and trauma in their struggle just to survive—especially since the structural causes of their impoverishment lie on our side of the border.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

There is room here only to caution the reader with a general rule of thumb: Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.

We have an abundance of "statistics of crime," but no statistics of virtue.

DULLARD, n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life... The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude... According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians.

Now the man in the street knows nothing of Biometrika: all he knows is that "you can prove anything by figures," though he forgets this the moment figures are used to prove anything he wants to believe.

The plural of anecdote is data.

A statistical analysis properly conducted is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions. The surgeon must guard carefully against false incisions...

Statistics are just a way for the mathematician to evangelize his faith.