Quotes About Statistics

Kahneman later wrote: This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.

We encounter regression to the mean almost every day of our lives. We should try to anticipate it, recognize it, and not be fooled by it.

Ronald Coase cynically observed that, "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

When a theory is generated by ransacking data, we can't use these pillaged data to test the theory.

There are few statistical facts more interesting than regression to the mean for two reasons. First, people encounter it almost every day of their lives. Second, almost nobody understands it.

Be doubly skeptical of graphs that have two vertical axes and omit zero from either or both axes.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

In most polls there are always about 5 percent of the people who 'don't know.' What isn't generally understood is that it's the same people in every poll.

I recently heard the following sentence on CNN: 'Because of high winds, about two hundred and fifty thousand people in New England are without power.' And I thought 'gee, when you think about it, about two hundred and seventy five million people in the United States are without power. They just aren't aware of it.

In the United States, in 1976 the top 1 percent had 19.9 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 1 percent had 35.4 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 5 percent had 63 percent of the wealth; and the top 20 percent had 88.9 percent of the wealth. That left the bottom 80 percent with 11.1 percent of the wealth.

75 percent of charter schools have results that are worse than, or no different from, traditional public schools.

Women are over 50 percent of the population.

On average, African-American women are 4 times as likely to die from pregnancy related complications. Latina women are at 2 times greater risk.

My time at Real Madrid wasn't a failure. I played 120 matches, I scored 28 goals, and I played an average of 30 games a season. What's more, I won three trophies: La Liga, a Copa del Rey, and a Supercopa de Espana.

I can just remember games as a young player, counting my stats on the sideline. 'What am I now? I'm this many completions for this many attempts. I wonder what my rating is.'

I'd get 3-4 cheap home runs every year. You know, little 'wood shots' down either line. They would be pop flies in any other park. But, goodness me, they didn't count the number of long outs!

Proactive policing has saved tens of thousands of minority lives since the mid-1990s.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

For 'Power of 10,' you can look at the methodology at CBS.com, it's a company called Rasmussen Reports. We poll thousands and thousands of people for each question, a real cross section of the United States.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

If there can be three certain things in life, instead of two, it might be death, taxes, and data.

As a quarterback, I appreciated the passer rating whether you threw the ball a majority of the time or if you didn't throw it as much. You were judged on a level playing field, and I thought teams should be ranked similarly.

Investing is a probabilistic business. Every once in a while, it's sort of like you're throwing six-sided dice, and anything except a one or a two, you're doing well. Statistically speaking, you throw the dice enough times, you're going to throw a one or a two five times in a row, and you're going to look pretty foolish, right?

There's an old rule of thumb in politics that 90 percent of all 90 year-olds vote and 25 percent of all 25 year-olds vote.