Quotes About Statistics

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.

As I look back on it now, it's obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

... the top 10 percent of incomes pay 70 percent of the income taxes and cast about 25 percent of the vote.

I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.

Every year pancreatic cancer kills more than 35,000 people in America—it's the fourth leading cause of cancer death.

First, the inhabitants of the world according to this calculation, amount to about seven hundred and thirty-one millions; four hundred and twenty millions of whom are still in pagan darkness; an hundred and thirty millions the followers of Mahomet; an hundred millions catholics; forty-four millions protestants; thirty millions of the greek and armenian churches, and perhaps seven millions of jews.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968]. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

We have to keep asserting that people committ crimes not because they come from so-called deprived backgrounds, but because they're wicked. The statistics showing that only .00137% of all crimes of senseless violence are carried out by stockbrokers from Sunningdale prove only that folk are stockbrokers because they have a sense of right and wrong - not vice versa.

East Asia's share of global exports went from 12 percent in 1960 to 31 percent by 2011. The same number in Latin America over the same period declined from 7 percent to 6 percent

By the war's end, non-Chileans constituted 53 percent of the first engineers; 20 percent of the second engineers;

It is a common fallacy to believe that the law of large numbers acts as a force endowed with memory seeking to return to the original state, and many wrong conclusions have been drawn from this assumption.

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

He noted in one of his earliest memos that the average annual return for stocks from 1926 to 1987 was 9.44 percent, but "if you had gone to cash and missed the best 50 of those 744 months, you have would have missed all of the return. This tells me that attempts at market timing are a source of risk, not protection."*

Avid TV viewers are more likely than others to believe their neighborhoods are unsafe, assume that crime rates are rising, and overestimate their odds of becoming a victim, and they are more likely to own guns.

Bonds are even worse, since their returns do not mean revert—a series of bad years is likely to be followed by even more bad ones, as happened during the 1970s. This is the point made by Jeremy Siegel in his superb treatise, Stocks For The Long Run. Professor Siegel pointed out that stocks outperformed bonds in only 61% of the years after 1802, but that they bested bonds in 80% of ten-year periods and in 99% of 30-year periods. Looked

The point here is that runs of 4 or more heads or tails are perceived as a nonrandom pattern, when in fact they are in fact the rule in random sequences, not the exception. Stock market participants frequently make this mistake, and an entirely bogus field of finance known as "technical analysis" is devoted to finding patterns in random financial data.

When victims are murdered by strangers, young people are more likely to be the perpetrators. "During 1976–1991, only 20 percent of all homicides were between strangers, whereas 34 percent of those committed by male juveniles were between strangers

The United States has a homicide rate three times that of Canada; two-thirds of those homicides are committed with firearms. A child in the United States is twelve times more likely to die of a firearm injury than a child in Canada. I could go on. The evidence in support of Canada's attitude and legislative action is so convincing only an idiot wouldn't get it.

I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat.

Probabilities are relative to background information.

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school. 42% of college students never read another book after college. 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year. 70% of US adults have not been to a bookstore in the last five years. 57% of new books are not read to completion. Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.