Quotes About Statistics

In modern terms we would say that the more strongly correlated the measurements, the less information, in Shannon's precise sense, a Bertillon card conveys.

If you decide what color jelly beans to eat based just on the papers that get published, you're making the same mistake the army made when they counted the bullet holes on the planes that came back from Germany.

Assessing the scale of the p-hacking problem is not so easy—

That's how the Law of Large Numbers works: not by balancing out what's already happened, but by diluting what's already happened with new data, until the past is so proportionally negligible that it can safely be forgotten.

Data is messy, and inference is hard.

Frederick Mosteller, who would later found Harvard's statistics department, was there. So was Leonard Jimmie Savage, the pioneer of decision theory and great advocate of the field that came to be called Bayesian statistics.* Norbert Wiener, the MIT mathematician and the creator of cybernetics, dropped by from time to time. This was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the

a group of MIT undergrads won millions of dollars by understanding the guts of the Massachusetts state lottery.

smaller populations are inherently more variable.

You can do linear regression without thinking about whether the phenomenon you're modeling is actually close to linear. But you shouldn't.

In the British statistician R. A. Fisher's famous formulation, "the 'one chance in a million' will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.

But the significance test that scientists use doesn't measure importance.

statistically noticeable" or "statistically detectable" instead of "statistically significant"! That would be truer to the meaning of the method,

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

Statistisch gezien was op 11 september 2001 om kwart voor negen 's ochtends de kans dat twee vliegtuigen zich in het World Trade Centre zouden boren vrijwel nul.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

There are two ways of lying. One, not telling the truth and the other, making up statistics.

Thus the total Armistice Day casualties were nearly 10 percent higher than those on D-Day.

Country boys turned out to be the fittest, producing 4.8 percent more able-bodied draftees per 100,000 than city boys. Whites were 1.2 percent more physically qualified than blacks and native-born Americans 3.5 percent more than those foreign-born.

In France, the war created 600,000 widows and left nearly one million children fatherless. In England three men were killed in World War I for every man killed in World War II.

grave injuries in 1.5 billion humans if administered to 'every person on earth.

I haven't trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I've never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex.

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.

We may be certain that, by the logic of double-entry accounting, these two percent will reappear in other records than the election statistics, for instance in the registers of penitentiaries and penal labor camps, or in those places where God alone counts the victims.

The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder.