Quotes About Statistics

By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of the NHL playoff series.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The rate of population growth in the United States is slightly below that required to reproduce itself.

I find it slightly absurd that the only thing we consume more of than water is concrete.

Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.

The actual number of atheists is quite small outside of Europe and Manhattan.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income.

There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. "Broken" does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.

Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).

It's not that nuclear energy never kills. It's that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear's known total death toll is just over

But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7 percent of state prisoners are there for nonviolent drug possession, and that 14.1 percent of state prisoners are locked up for any nonviolent drug offense. Forty-seven percent of inmates in federal prisons are in for nonviolent drug convictions, but there are just 172,000 people in federal prisons and 1.3 million in state prisons.7 Over half of all prisoners in state prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery.8

Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

Stories of individual animals must now be told. Not stats and population densities, but characters in stories that very much mirror our own daily struggles to survive. An individual, well loved, even heroic wolf like OR7 with whom we've so deeply identified can never be a statistic again.

Entropy can decrease. It's just ridiculously unlikely.

The highest paid Americans read an average of two to three hours per day. The lowest paid Americans don't read at all... ...58% of adults never read another book after they leave high school—including 42% of university graduates... ...43.6% of American adults read below the 7th grade level... they are functionally illiterate... fully 50% of high school graduates cannot read their graduation diplomas, nor fill out an application form for a job at McDonald's...

Percentage of Actively Managed Mutual Funds Outperformed by the S&P 500 Index (Periods through June 30, 2012) Sources: Lipper and The Vanguard Group.

The largest, longest study of experts' economic forecasts was performed by Philip Tetlock, a professor at the Haas Business School of the University of California–Berkeley. He studied 82,000 predictions over 25 years by 300 selected experts. Tetlock concludes that expert predictions barely beat random guesses. Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be.

According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide.

Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies in the laboratory.

A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay.

the more people killed in a war, the less likely it was to occur, and the longer before you could witness it, just as violent storms occur less frequently than cloudbursts. Richardson

Many people, conservatives point out, grow up in dismal social conditions yet become law-abiding citizens. This is rather like arguing that because some smokers don't die of cancer, nobody who smokes dies of cancer.