Quotes About Interpretation

I don't know facts, and probably there aren't any to know. Whatever crazy thing people want to believe, that's what they call it, a fact.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don't know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up. For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

every act, object and statement that man perceives is meaningful (even "nothing") and […] the frontiers of meaning are always, momentarily, in state of collapse and paradox.

semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of "meaning" as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

When I walk the fields I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.

Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool.

F)iction is...what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

In our tongue we would say alfär.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience—it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

Brains mouses over one of the images.

Yet in one way or another all of us - readers and writers alike - are ultimately prisoners of the documents. And the chains are hard to see

But I couldn't hear what he was saying.

O. A. Manning's poetry

This distinction between correlation and causation is crucial to the proper interpretation of statistical results.

Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.

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

our ability to analyze data has grown far more sophisticated than our thinking about what we ought to do with the results. You

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.

Although the field of statistics is rooted in mathematics, and mathematics is exact, the use of statistics to describe complex phenomena is not exact.

The same data can (and should) be interpreted entirely differently if one changes the unit of analysis. We don't care about poor countries; we care about poor people.

The world is producing more and more data, ever faster and faster. Yet, as the New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge."3* Statistics is the most powerful tool we have for using information to some meaningful end

Our sample of 25 will still give us meaningful information, as would a sample of 5 or 10—but how meaningful? The t-distribution answers that question.

Specifically, the more data we have in our sample, the more "degrees of freedom" we have when determining the appropriate distribution against which to evaluate our results.