Quotes About Statistics

1870, Britain produced 32 percent of all the manufactured goods in the world, followed by the United States at 23 percent and Germany at 13 percent.

By 1709, the Irish owned only 14 percent of the land in their own

Whatever we're trying to understand about the world, each other, and ourselves, we won't get far without statistics – any more than we can hope to examine bones without an X-ray, bacteria without a microscope, or the heavens without a telescope.

A lobby group seeking to deny the statistical evidence will always be able to point to some aspect of the current science that is not settled, note that the matter is terribly complicated, and call for more research. And these claims will sound scientific, even rather wise. Yet they give a false and dangerous impression: that nobody really knows anything.

Yes, it's easy to lie with statistics—but it's even easier to lie without them.*

Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It's not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it's a habit that does little harm and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can't make them vanish, nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.

In October 1949, less than two years after the trial began, Doll stopped smoking. He was thirty-seven, and had been a smoker his entire adult life. He and Hill had discovered that heavy smoking of cigarettes didn't just double the risk of lung cancer, or triple the risk, or even quadruple the risk. It made you sixteen times more likely to get lung cancer.

Testing a hypothesis using the numbers that helped form the hypothesis in the first place is not OK.15

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy too.

countries. The United States has a notoriously high infant mortality rate for a rich country—6.1 deaths per thousand live births in 2010. In Finland, by comparison, it is just 2.3. But it turns out that physicians in America, like those in the UK's Midlands, seem to be far more likely to record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, than as a late miscarriage.

In fact, about 60 percent of gun deaths in the United States are suicides, not homicides or rare accidents.

Census taking is among the oldest ways of collecting statistics. Much newer, but with similar aspirations to reach everyone, is "big data." Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Oxford's Internet Institute, and coauthor of the book Big Data, told me that his favored definition of a big dataset is one where "N = All"—where we no longer have to sample, because we have the entire background population.[18

And according to the most recent annual data from 2009, even when a black person has a college degree, he or she is nearly twice as likely as one of us with a degree to be unemployed, while Latinos and Asian Americans with degrees are 40 percent more likely than we are to be out of work, with the same qualifications.

So far, you have read of the deaths of 557,017 people – one of whom was killed by a streetcar, one of whom died of bronchitis and one of whom died in a barn with her rabbits.

American Cancer Society estimates that in 2015 1,658,370 new cancer cases will be diagnosed and that in the same year about 1,600 people will die from cancer-related conditions daily.

The psychopath emerges as anything up to five times more likely to beat, rape, kill, or mutilate his way back behind bars.

the murder rate in the mines was horrendous—an annual rate of 506.6 homicides per 100,000 population in Sonora, for example, in 1850–51, which is fifty times the national homicide rate of 1999.

San Francisco averaged a homicide rate of 49 per 100,000 between 1849 and 1856, six times the 1997 homicide rate

For me, unemployment and poverty in the Greater Montreal area is not mainly a problem of structure, or design, or statistics. It is a profoundly human situation.

If just half the Americans already getting a dog went the shelter route, then statistically speaking, every cage in US animal control facilities could be emptied. Right now.

Most Americans are unaware that the average income of the bottom 50 percent of their population has declined over a thirty-year period.

Two points are pertinent to the Great Reset in this: 1) our human actions and reactions are not rooted in statistical data but are determined instead by emotions and sentiments – narratives drive our behaviour; and 2) as our human condition improves, our standards of living increase and so do our expectations for a better and fairer life.

in June 2020, researchers Supriya Garikipati (University of Liverpool) and Uma Kambhampati (University of Reading) confirmed the finding statistically,12 arguing that female-led countries, such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and indeed New Zealand, did better than most in responding to the pandemic.

Yet there seemed to be some truth in the law of probability, according to which the chance of success is directly proportionate to the number of repetitions.