Quotes About Statistics

Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.

In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty," they wrote, "people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic error.

The math of the matter changed with the situation, but, broadly speaking, an attempted steal had to succeed about 70 percent of the time before it contributed positively to run totals.

In the end, he decided that the Rockets needed to reduce to data, and subject to analysis, a lot of stuff that had never before been seriously analyzed: physical traits. They needed to know not just how high a player jumped but how quickly he left the earth—how fast his muscles took him into the air. They needed to measure not just the speed of the player but the quickness of his first two steps. That is, they needed to be even more geeky than they already were.

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

For some reason human beings did not see it that way. "People's intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well," Danny and Amos wrote.

But because he has misjudged how large the sample needs to be if it is to stand a good chance of reflecting the entire population, he is at the mercy of luck.

Paul Meehl's book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm.

But Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team.

doctors don't think probabilities apply to their patients

Nineteen eighteen, said Carter. What happened then? asked Obama. Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died

United States, with a bit more than 4 percent of the world's population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths.

In Redelmeier's experience, doctors did not think statistically. "Eighty percent of doctors don't think probabilities apply to their patients," he said. "Just like 95 percent of married couples don't believe the 50 percent divorce rate applies to them, and 95 percent of drunk drivers don't think the statistics that show that you are more likely to be killed if you are driving drunk than if you are driving sober applies to them.

In Danny and Amos's working theory, the paradox was now resolved differently. It wasn't that (or at least not only that) people anticipated regret when making a decision in the first situation that they did not anticipate in making the second. It was that they treated 50 percent as more than 50 percent and saw the difference between 4 percent and 2 percent as far less than it was.

Al realizar predicciones y juicios en condiciones de incertidumbre, la gente no parece seguir el cálculo de probabilidades ni la teoría estadística de la predicción. Más bien se basa en un limitado número de heurísticas que a veces dan lugar a juicios razonables y otras veces conducen a graves y sistemáticos errores.

Cuando no tenemos evidencia concreta, utilizamos correctamente las probabilidades básicas; cuando disponemos de evidencia concreta pero inútil, no se tienen en cuenta las probabilidades básicas

Statistics wasn't just boring numbers; it contained ideas that allowed you to glimpse deep truths about human life. "Because

Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team. "Your mind needs to be in a constant state of defense against all this crap that is trying to mislead you," he said. "We're always trying to figure out what's a trick and what's real. Are we seeing a hologram? Is this an illusion?

It was also possible to back out from the box scores the pace at which various college teams played—how often they went up and down the court. Adjusting a college player's stats for his team's pace of play was telling. Points and rebounds meant one thing when the team took 150 shots a game and something different when it took just 75. Just adjusting for pace gave you a clearer picture of what any given player had accomplished than the conventional view did.

Using the most conservative assumptions suggested by the cruise ship—an attack rate of 20 percent and a fatality rate of half of 1 percent—you wound up with 330,000 dead Americans.

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population...people can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices.

Page 199: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics, more than 20 percent of all imports to the United States come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. … This is why American business is so adamantly opposed to tariffs—not fear of foreign retaliation, but fear of tariffs on products from American-owned industrial plantations.

In Russia, the number of women murdered annually—primarily by husbands and boyfriends—skyrocketed from 5,300 to 15,000 in the first three years of the free-market paradise. In 1994, an additional 57,000 women were seriously injured in such assaults.

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.