Best 232 quotes in «statistics quotes» category

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

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

You only find complete unanimity in a cemetary.

Without analysis, no synthesis.

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.

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

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

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

All statistics have outliers.

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.

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

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

A statistical anomaly does not prove wrongdoing. Delma Kinney, a fifty-year-old Atlanta man, won $1 million in an instant lottery in 2008 and then another $1 million in an instant game in 2011. The probability of that happening to the same person is somewhere in the range of 1 in 25 trillion.

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.

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.

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.

Be wary, though, of the way news media use the word “significant,” because to statisticians it doesn’t mean “noteworthy.” In statistics, the word “significant” means that the results passed mathematical tests such as t-tests, chi-square tests, regression, and principal components analysis (there are hundreds). Statistical significance tests quantify how easily pure chance can explain the results. With a very large number of observations, even small differences that are trivial in magnitude can be beyond what our models of change and randomness can explain. These tests don’t know what’s noteworthy and what’s not—that’s a human judgment.

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

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

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).

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

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

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!

He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.

His secret, like those of nine of his fellow seniors, is safe with me. At Milton High, I’m my own statistic. People fail to see the great equalizer, the one thing the band geeks, the drama nerds, the jocks, and the preppies all have in common. Me-Mercedes Ayres. The girl who took their virginity.

Her statistics were more than a study... For her, Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique Sociale is annotated by her on every page. Florence Nightingale believed—and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief—that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator—to say nothing of the politician—too often failed for want of this knowledge.

He who says that someone isn’t himself is a victim of statistics.

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.

I don't believe in the glory and the dream. I believe in statistics.

How easy it is for so many of us today to be undoubtedly full of information yet fully deprived of accurate information.

If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.

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

If college admissions officers are going to encourage kids to take the same AP math class, why not statistics? Almost every career (whether in business, nonprofits, academics, law, or medicine benefits from proficiency in statistics. Being an informed, responsible citizen requires a sound knowledge of statistics, as politicians, reporters, and bloggers all rely on "data" to justify positions. [p.98]

If proof were needed that statistics alone are not enough in establishing value, then VT Trumper is that proof.

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.

If you want what’s best for your kids, one surefire way to provide them with a healthy, happy home is to make sure they have lesbian parents. In the longest-running study of lesbian families to date,2 zero percent of children reported physical or sexual abuse—not a one. In the general population, 26 percent of children report physical abuse and 8.3 percent report sexual abuse.

I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.

I have studied many languages-French, Spanish and a little Italian, but no one told me that Statistics was a foreign language.

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

I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.

I just wish that Statistics was as easy as arranging numbers in chronological order, finding the median, lower and upper quartiles, and placing them on a Box and whisker's chart

In the days when the white engineers were disputing the attributes of the feeder system that was to be, one of them came to Enzian of Bleicherode and said, "We cannot agree on the chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pressure of 40 atü would be the most desirable. But all the data we know of are grouped around a value of only some 10 atü." "Then clearly," replied the Nguarorerue, "you must listen to the data." "But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value," protested the German. "Proud man," said the Nguarorerue. "What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value." – from Tales of the Schwarzkommando, collected by Steve Edelman

In 2012, an estimated 14,827 persons were murdered in the United States. -- Federal Bureau of Investigation

In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white.