Quotes About Statistics

This again is a probabilistic process whose future is difficult to predict but whose past is easy to understand.

American people whether they agree that plants create the oxygen in the air, light travels faster than sound, or you cannot make radioactive milk safe by boiling it, you will get double-digit disagreement in each case (13 percent, 24 percent, and 35 percent, respectively

Over the hundreds of at bats he has each year, those random factors usually average out and result in some typical home run production that increases as the player becomes more skillful and then eventually decreases owing to the same process

The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.

the same mathematics that describes drawing pebbles from an urn can be employed to describe any series of trials in which each trial has two possible outcomes, as long as those outcomes are random and the trials are independent of each other.

regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.

in real-life situations we often make the opposite error: we assume that a sample or a series of trials is representative of the underlying situation when it is actually far too small to be reliable.

The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy.

We cannot know whether our single observation represents the mean or an outlier, an event to bet on or a rare happening that is not likely to be reproduced.

that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11

So the relevant question is, if thousands of people are tossing coins once a year and have been doing so for decades, what are the chances that one of them, for some fifteen-year period, will toss all heads?

law of large numbers is employed because, as we've said, Bernoulli's theorem concerns the way results reflect underlying probabilities when we make a large number of observations.

Pearson invented a method, called the chi-square test, by which you can determine whether a set of data actually conforms to the distribution you believe it conforms to.

People around the world drink more coffee than any other drink besides water: four hundred billion cups a year.

Americans...publish more books than any other country, but the per capita figure is surprisingly low. Of the English-speaking nations, the United States comes in fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The United Kingdom publishes 2,336 books per person, the United States 545.

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.

It is absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt that more firearms in a society actually cuts the amount of crime in that same society.

Somerset House in London where at one time English vital statistics were kept - birth marriage and death records - was known as the egg factory "where they hatch 'em match 'em and dispatch 'em."

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.

In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.

I'm just like everybody else. I have two arms, two legs and four-thousand hits.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Not really, and actually my cholesterol was 190 when I had the heart attack. 190, which isn't that high. I took it down to about 130 and it's probably about 140 or 145 now.