Quotes About Statistics

If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable. For this reason we become attracted to certain narratives: it is genetics that determines much of what we do; we are just products of our times; the individual is just a myth; human behavior can be reduced to statistical trends.

The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation. At seventy-two abortions per one hundred births, Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and Cuban doctors routinely force women to abort high-risk pregnancies so that Cuba's bureaucrats can brag about their health statistics. If you correct the data to account for these factors, Cuba's health statistics look a lot less impressive.5

If they're told, "The drug has a 95 percent survival rate," people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, "The drug has a 5 percent death rate.

History proves that 85 percent of all options expire without being exercised.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Science of yoga and ayurveda is subtler than the science of medicine, because science of medicine is often victim of statistical manipulation.

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Medical statistics are a little bit like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

To understand God's thoughts, one must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.

To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

The science about life is very optimistic. Every second, four people in the world die, and six are born. This is optimistic.

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.

What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Data-driven statistics has the danger of isolating statistics from the rest of the scientific and mathematical communities by not allowing valuable cross-pollination of ideas from other fields.

Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.