Quotes About Statistics

A number of studies show that immigrants generally have a lower level of criminal activity and incarceration than the general population, even when income and education levels are considered.3

The Library of Congress reports that the Army Office of the Surgeon General for Medical Statistics "does not have figures on single or multiple amputees." Either the government doesn't think them important, or, in the words of a researcher for one of the national television networks, "the military itself, while sure of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms its men have lost.

Four point two

Research shows that if you are under thirty years old, there is a 90 percent chance you will be fired sometime in the next twenty years.

Now, remember what Bayes' Theorem does: it helps us update a hypothesis based on new evidence.

Bayes' Theorem does: it helps us update a hypothesis based on new evidence.

In 1991, the average bra size in the U.S wad 34B. Today (2007) it's 36C.

Statistically, people recover or die at the same rate with or without attempted faith healing.

business writer Polly LaBarre notes, "The United States spends more on trash bags than ninety other countries spend on everything.

researchers have found that extraversion has "no statistically significant relationship . . . with sales performance

Only 1 percent of our respondents said that they never engage in such behavior—and fewer than 17 percent do it rarely. Meanwhile, about 43 percent report doing it frequently or all the time. In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work.9

Since roughly 90 percent of the population is right-handed, that means that in roughly 90 percent of the population, the left hemisphere is controlling important movements such as handwriting, eating, and maneuvering a computer mouse.

The U.S. private sector employs three times as many salespeople as all fifty state governments combined employ people. If the nation's salespeople lived in a single state, that state would be the fifth-largest in the United States.

Nowadays, everyone—whether we're the head of an organization or its freshest hire—faces a torrent of information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

On average, humans have one testicle

Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.

Just because someone quotes you a statistic or shows you a graph, it doesn't mean it's relevant to the point they're trying to make. It's the job of all of us to make sure we get the information that matters, and to ignore the information that doesn't.

The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships, compared to a fraction of that in the decade before.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning.

Researchers who pick too small a sample leave themselves at the mercy of sampling luck.

Causally, noise is nowhere; statistically, it is everywhere.

Nine per cent of my viewers are men, of which the majority is, I think, 45 to 50. I like to tell myself it's just my dad watching.

Fifty one per cent of 'Time Team' viewers are not of my gender. And that surprised me, because I thought it'd be at least 60 per cent male.