Quotes About Analysis

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games.

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface. "It

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease.

The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.

They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.

In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom….

Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.

When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of." That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.

It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn't working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.

line. Giants coach Tom Coughlin suspected another culprit. He stayed up that night reviewing game tape, and finally took out a stopwatch

Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason.

On the Psychology of Prediction

No one cares about data when everything is going well," said Josh Wills, the former chief data engineer at Slack, who agreed to help. "People only care about data when the shit hits the fan. 'Oh my God, what's going on??? We need data!

that'll go to zero. Everything will be observed. Everything will be predicted.

Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.

The two other states that moved most quickly to shut down, Ohio and Maryland, had also paid close attention to Carter's analysis.

The math of the matter changed with the situation, but, broadly speaking, an attempted steal had to succeed about 70 percent of the time before it contributed positively to run totals.

How a switch made by Cisco compared to a switch made by Juniper.

In the end, he decided that the Rockets needed to reduce to data, and subject to analysis, a lot of stuff that had never before been seriously analyzed: physical traits. They needed to know not just how high a player jumped but how quickly he left the earth—how fast his muscles took him into the air. They needed to measure not just the speed of the player but the quickness of his first two steps. That is, they needed to be even more geeky than they already were.

You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at, and what humans are good and bad at," said Morey. Humans sometimes had access to information that the model did not, for instance.

If the first three chips they withdrew from a bag were red, for instance, they put the odds at 3:1 that the bag contained a majority of red chips. The true, Bayesian odds were 27:1. People shifted the odds in the right direction, in other words; they just didn't shift them dramatically enough. Ward Edwards had coined a phrase to describe how human beings responded to new information. They were "conservative Bayesians.

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease. American cities that didn't did not.