Quotes About Accuracy

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

Furthermore, people who make forecasts professionally are often more affected by such impediments than those who don't.

in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy.

that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

They love precision at the expense of applicability.

With novelists, names and dates are wrong, the rest is true. With historians, names and dates are correct, the rest is false.

Anyone who causes harm by forecasting should be treated as either a fool or a lier. Some forecasters cause more damage to society than criminals.

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal);

those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future

The first error lies in taking a projection too seriously, without heeding its accuracy.

I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong.

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.

The forecasters' errors were significantly larger than the average difference between individual forecasts, which indicates herding. Normally, forecasts should be as far from one another as they are from the predicted number.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

This last sentence is imprecise.

a lie can run around the internet before the truth has logged on to facebook

History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator

outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp

I dared not make a mistake…

Statistics is like a high-caliber weapon: helpful when used correctly and potentially disastrous in the wrong hands.

Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading.

But who says that everyone using statistics is smart or honest? As mentioned, this book began as an homage to How to Lie with Statistics, which was first published in 1954 and has sold over a million copies.