Quotes About Statistics

Outliers are increasingly unlikely. You

The fact that you got heads or tails on the previous flip does not change the odds of your getting heads or tails on the next one.

The situation is even more lopsided with book sales. If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies. For any large total, the breakdown will be more and more asymmetric. Why

Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.

Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

Randomness will be ruled out as a possible factor in the performance

Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to the rise of education—not an optical illusion. We

Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.

I wonder why people don't realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon

In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.

in fact, they are so blind to the odds that they treat odds of one in a thousand and one in a million almost in the same way.

the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.

It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation.

You can effortlessly look up accident statistics on the Web, but they do not easily come to mind. Note

No single observation can meaningfully affect the aggregate.

The distribution was massively skewed, with the bulk of the deaths coming from birth and childhood mortality.

I am not saying that Warren Buffett is not skilled; only that a large population of random investors will almost necessarily produce someone with his track records just by luck.

As Sherlock Holmes noted in the Silver Blaze case—the curious thing was that the dog did not bark. More problematic, there are plenty of scientific results that are left out of publications because they are not statistically significant, but nevertheless provide information.

while the lives saved by the drug might not be accounted for anywhere.

fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings.

Si veo a una mujer embarazada, el sexo del niño que lleva en su seno es para mí una cuestión puramente aleatoria (un 50% para cada sexo); pero no para el ginecólogo, que podría haber hecho una ecografía. En la práctica, la aleatoriedad es fundamentalmente información incompleta.

Median means roughly that 50% of the people die before eight months and 50% survive longer than eight months. But those who survive would live considerably longer, generally going about life just like a regular person and fulfilling the average 73.4 or so years predicted by insurance mortality tables. There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long.

However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds.

This subtle but extremely consequential property of scalable randomness is unusually counterintuitive. We misunderstand the logic of large deviations from the norm.