Quotes About Statistics

I don't read good reviews. I like to know what percentages are going on. When Sony sends out something saying that people are liking the movie, I like to know that, but I don't actually sit and read the good stuff.

In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'

I think I'm statistically literate and numbers-oriented. But I'm nowhere near as sophisticated as a lot of other folks I see. Maybe that helps me not get too jargony and communicate this stuff in a way that's somewhat accessible.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

I'm over there filming in South Africa now, and two in five are HIV-positive now. Not many people know that.

There are 613, 806, 639 men in the world. Statistically, God has got you covered! So, never worry about one person not caring about you. Someone up to the challenge will always take his place.

More data means more information, but it also means more false information.

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Statistics stay silent in us.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical "evidence" (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).

Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent.

Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals—one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be?

It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.

Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism

The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is occurring more regularly than in reality. This helps us to be prudent and careful in daily life, forcing us to add an extra layer of protection, but

Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its

We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.

One of the problems I face in life is that whenever I tell people that the Gaussian bell curve is not ubiquitous in real life, only in the minds of statisticians, they require me to "prove it"—which is easy to do, as we will see in the next two chapters, yet nobody has managed to prove the opposite

Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones.

There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.