Quotes About Statistics

Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)

You're more likely to die from a falling coconut than from a shark attack, and more likely to die on your birthday than any other day of the year. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes and, over a lifetime, spends twenty-five years sleeping. About 11 percent of the population are left-handed. The most typical human face on Earth is that of a 28-year-old Chinese man.

The expression 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics' was popularised by Mark Twain and attributed by him, in his autobiography, to the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Statistics can easily fool us if used incorrectly, or if we fail to take in the whole picture of what's going on. The situation is even worse when data are presented in a way that's deliberately misleading – as often happens in advertising and politics. Without resorting to outright lies, there are plenty of ways to distort data to create a false impression.

A final note on numbers: My research shows Ann Eliza was most likely Brigham's 52 of 55 wives. As far as I can tell, she was called the 19th because removed from the total tally were the wives who had died, who were barren, or whom Brigham no longer had sexual relations with.

It turns out that you only need 23 people for it to be more likely to find a shared birthday than not.

With 80 people, the size of this classroom, the probability that there will be no shared birthdays is so tiny as to be virtually impossible.

In Dan's case, the interest in policymaking is so central to the students' presence at Harvard that it would be foolish to run a statistics course that did not acknowledge it. He goes as far as to build this into the purpose of the course: as we heard earlier, his purpose is "not just to maximise learning about statistics, but also to maximise learning of the skills that will be useful to have out there in the world.

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

If you are one in a million in China, you're one of 1,300 people.

in real statistical analyses the computer takes over the tedium of arithmetic juggling.

A dice maker agreed with Scarne: "Once in a blue moon you might find a single store die that classes as a perfect, but the chance of finding two of them in a box of 60 and the chance that they would both be sold to the same purchaser as a pair is so small you can forget about it. It never happened.

it is easy to lie with statistics, but easier to lie without them'.

This recognition – that real statistics is about exploring the unknown, not about tedious arithmetic manipulation – is central to an appreciation of the modern discipline.

So what is going on? For the men and women separately, the crew had a higher survival rate than the third-class passengers. But overall the crew had a lower survival rate than the third-class passengers. This is not a trick—the numbers are what they are.

He served as a cryptanalyst with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and returned to River-bank to write an 87-page tract that revolutionized cryptanalysis by introducing statistical methods for the first time.

If Doc can't let it go, you can always remind him that statistically a human is more likely to die from a hospital error than from a motorcycle ride.

God is just a statistics.

Like 84% of Canadians, I believe in God.

Fantasy football is not only a good thing, but a great thing.

I don't go by the ratings. I buy wine that tastes good. Statistically, anybody's ability to predict what will be a good wine a decade from now is limited.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

The White House says that the unemployment rate is good news because it means more people are looking for jobs. More good news like that, and everyone at the White House will be looking for jobs.

There is no good way of measuring poverty.