Best 232 quotes in «statistics quotes» category

When you flip a coin there is a very small but finite chance you will never ever see that coin again.

While most of us are comfortable acknowledging that luck plays a role in what we do, we have difficulty assessing its role after the fact. Once something has occurred and we can put together a story to explain it, it starts to seem like the outcome was predestined. Statistics don't appeal to our need to understand cause and effect, which is why they are so frequently ignored or misinterpreted. Stories, on the other hand, are a rich means to communicate precisely because they emphasize cause and effect.

Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.

Writing requires immortal thoughts hidden in your conscience which lead you to all philosophical, emotional, romantic statistics of the humans of this celestial world.

Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?' 'Why am I surrounded,' his usual understanding self today, 'by statistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant.

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers.

You can flip a coin but Schrodinger's pet cat will still be in that box.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

According to FBI statistics for 2008, only 22 percent of murder victims were killed by strangers. More than 30 percent were slain by family members, boyfriends, and girlfriends. Nearly half of all murders were committed by friends, neighbors, and casual acquaintances.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, before NAFTA went into effect, there were 285,000 auto workers in Michigan. Today, that number is only 160,000.

A marveilous newtrality have these things mathematicall, and also a strange participation between things supernaturall and things naturall.

And with the rape, I was showing why the rape statistics are exaggerated, and saying that date rape was much more complex than the way feminists had portrayed it, as men oppressing women.

Baseball is probably the world's best documented sport.

You’ll also be pleased to know that no resident has been eaten in their sleep here for almost thirty-seven years.

Your relevance as a data custodian is your ability to analyse and interpret it. If you can’t, your replacement is due.

Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics. - It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.

A little uncertainty is good for everyone.

And if California slides into the ocean, as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this hotel will be standing until I've paid my bill.

Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

Crib death was so infrequent in the pre-vaccination era that it was not even mentioned in the statistics, but it started to climb in the 1950s with the spread of mass vaccination against diseases of childhood.

But just as much as it is easy to find the differential [derivative] of a given quantity, so it is difficult to find the integral of a given differential. Moreover, sometimes we cannot say with certainty whether the integral of a given quantity can be found or not.

But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and direction and to combine according to the parallelogram law; and many of them are not at all reminiscent of journeys.

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.

Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

Don't be too hard on me. Everyone has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Don't let the fear of statistics keep you from launching a continual improvement program. The statistics hurdle is easily overcome, going out of business is not.

Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history.

Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

Formatting is no substitute for writing.

I didn't have statistics in my mind when I was racing. It was always a consequence - a nice consequence. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't the reason I was racing.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Have you noticed that all the news, statistics, strategies about unemployment are provided by those who are employed? As soon as you are unemployed you cease to exist.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed.

If I were sitting down with George Steinbrenner (to discuss a salary) and based on what Dave Winfield got for his statistics, I'd have to say, 'George, you and I are about to become partners.'

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

If they would only do as he did and publish posthumously we should all be saved a lot of trouble.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

If the statistics are boring, you've got the wrong numbers.

I'm doing everything that I can, working with experts, really studying the statistics to figure out a way we can make it cool or normal to be kind and loving.

If you are doing things the same way as two years ago, you are almost certainly doing them wrong.

I learned many years ago never to waste time trying to convince my colleagues.

Is it in the UK's interests to leave the EU? It depends on your values. The answer can't be read off of GDP statistics under various scenarios or some measures of global influence.