Quotes About Statistics

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought.

They keep making the same mistake: predicting rare events from weak evidence. When the evidence is weak, one should stick with the base rates.

anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes.

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is—chance selected it from among its alternatives. Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker.

Averaging is mathematically guaranteed to reduce noise:

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level," and by the time of Repeal had risen "to about 60–70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level.

In 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of the stuff; by 1890 annual consumption had exploded to 855 million gallons. During that four-decade span, while the population tripled, that population's capacity for beer had increased twenty-four-fold.

Statisticamente tutto si spiega, personalmente tutto si complica.

Su circa 7 miliardi di abitanti nel pianeta, sono circa 7 milioni i migranti potenziali, dunque l'1% dell'umanità. Il paventato pericolo migratorio è un fantasma, alimentato da certa politica elettorale, per suscitare paura nei cittadini.

In 1979, only 40 percent of American men with at least a college degree had wives who also had at least graduated from college. By 2016 the comparable percentage was 70 percent.

Unlike people, numbers never lied.

Officially, 5 percent of southern slaves worked in industrial occupations. But the statistic understates the reality. It does not include artisans who worked on plantations making articles for use on that plantation, and thus ignores countless enslaved blacksmiths, masons, cabinetmakers, cordwainers, saddle-makers, plow-wrights, and other craftsmen.

Now these figures have pretty conclusively demonstrated that people who have gone to college make more money than people who have not. The exceptions are numerous, of course, but the tendency is strong and clear.

My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word "average" having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is an average you still don't know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is—mean, median, or mode.

Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers brings about a suspension of common sense.

There is terror in numbers.

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's "big lie" it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

IF YOU can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has.

Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers bring about a suspension of common sense

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let's check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.