Best 232 quotes in «statistics quotes» category

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

The most crazed religious fanatic argues in more calm and reasoned tones than liberals responding to statistics on concealed-carry permits.

The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

There are some women out there who are just going to look better with a mustache: that's statistics.

The Place of No Shadows, in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine (1990) In our Universe, matter is arranged in a hierarchy of structures by successive integrations.

The search for truth is more precious than its possession.

The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.

The propositions of mathematics have, therefore, the same unquestionable certainty which is typical of such propositions as "All bachelors are unmarried," but they also share the complete lack of empirical content which is associated with that certainty: The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.

The type of measure used placed constraints on which statistics can be used.

The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

The testament of science is so continually in a flux that the heresy of yesterday is the gospel of today and the fundamentalism of tomorrow.

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the [Barack] Obama administration are not believable.

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.

What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!

We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures.

What used to be called prejudice is now called a null hypothesis.

We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.

We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth.

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

You are in big trouble when you start writing software to impress girls.

You have not had thirty years' experience . . . You have had one year's experience 30 times.

You do not know me, but I am a juvenile delinquent. I do not trust authority figures, I probably will not graduate from high school, and statistics say my present rowdiness and vandalism will likely lead to more serious crimes. I am a dangerous fellow, and I am causing mayhem in this store. [...] There. I have now shamelessly destroyed the symmetry of this shelf, undoing hours of labor by underpaid store employees. If you could see me, you would be frightened.

Access is one of those words that should raise red flags when you encounter them in statistics. People having access to health care might simply mean they live near a medical facility, not that the facility would admit them or that they could pay for it. As you learned above, C-SPAN is available in 100 million homes, but that doesn’t mean that 100 million people are watching it. I could claim that 90 percent of the world’s population has “access” to Weaponized Lies by showing that 90 percent of the population is within twenty-five miles of an Internet connection, rail line, road, landing strip, port, or dogsled route.

According to the United Kingdom Tea Council, 96 percent of tea is consumed in the form of tea bags (an American invention), 98 percent of people take milk, and 45 percent take sugar. Residents of the United Kingdom each consume 2.3 kilos of tea per year to Americans' 0.2 kilos.

All statistics have outliers.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

You only find complete unanimity in a cemetary.

99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

A small sample, we repeat, is rarely the big scientific problem. Interpretation is.

Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk, which itself is an iffy enterprise, they cannot dictate what level of risk people ought to accept. People might object to a nuclear power plant that has a minuscule risk of a meltdown not because they overestimate the risk, but because they feel that the cost of a catastrophe, no matter how remote, are too dreadful. And of course any of these trade-offs may be unacceptable if people perceive that the benefits would go to the wealthy and powerful while they themselves absorb the risks. Nonetheless, understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed. It can help scientists and journalists explain a new technology in the face of the most common misunderstandings. And it can help all of us understand the technology so that we can accept or reject it on grounds that we can justify to ourselves and to others.

Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as "her luck has run out" and "He is due." That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store.

A vast army of government employees [Central, state and local government] of around 20 million are taken care by the remaining 380 million of the workforce, which also meets the extortionate and rent-seeking demands of the government employees.

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.

Be careful of averages and how they’re applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as: "On average, humans have one testicle.

By the time your perfect information has been gathered, the world has moved on.

Coincidence”, he finally said. “Statisticans looking for connections can always find odd coincidences and statistical anomalies, if they try hard enough.

Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence” (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).

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

Every lateness give us a staggering statistics in negative economic effect

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.

Fire, knives, automobiles, hair removal cream. Each of these things serves an important purpose. Each one makes our lives better. And each one can cause some serious problems when abused. Now you can add statistics to that list.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!