Quotes About Statistics

But it is crucial to let your son know that when unmarried couples live together when their child is born, by the child's third birthday, 40 percent of those children will have no regular contact with their dad for the next two years- between the ages of three and five.

For the first time in US history, more than half of children born to mothers under thirty were born outside marriage.

Today, young men between twenty-five and thirty-one are 66 percent more likely than their female counterparts to be living with their parents.

Moving away from studies, what of real world feedback? In West Germany, rape rates have slightly declined since 1973, when pornography became widely available; meanwhile, other violent crime has increased. In Japan, where pornography depicting violence is widely available, rape is much lower per capita than in the United States, where violence in porn is restricted.

regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.

This should not come as a surprise: overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere. Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases Examples of the planning fallacy abound in the experiences of individuals, governments, and businesses.

Scientists in diverse disciplines were quick to adopt the least squares method. Over two centuries later, it remains the standard way to evaluate errors wherever achieving accuracy is the goal.

our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with "mere statistics.

Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

Simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense are often very good predictors of significant outcomes. In a memorable example, Dawes showed that marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels You don't want your result to be a negative number.

Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths.

A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs—an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness.

Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.

traffic deaths.

The prominence of causal intuitions is a recurrent theme in this book because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical reasoning. Statistical thinking derives conclusions about individual cases from properties of categories and ensembles. Unfortunately, System 1 does not have the capability for this mode of reasoning; System 2 can learn to think statistically, but few people receive the necessary training.

the following two statements mean exactly the same thing: Large samples are more precise than small samples. Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do.

Analysis of thousands of sequences of shots led to a disappointing conclusion: there is no such thing as a hot hand in professional basketball, either in shooting from the field or scoring from the foul line.

The strong bias toward believing that small samples closely resemble the population from which they are drawn is also part of a larger story: we are prone to exaggerate the consistency and coherence of what we see.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics

whenever the correlation between two scores is imperfect, there will be regression to the mean.

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.