Statistics

"New challenges driven by evolving global technology inspire fresh trends and approaches in teaching statistics in business schools of the 21st century."

"In the 1930s English statistical theory was beginning to travel, with contributions from, amongst others, Hotelling and Snedecor in America and Darmois in France, but its home was still in England where there were four important centres: University College London, Rothamsted Experimental Station, Edinburgh University and Cambridge University with University College and Rothamsted far in the lead. Although Cambridge University was slow to adopt modern statistical theory, Cambridge men–Karl Pearson, Edmund Whittaker and Ronald Fisher–had put the other places on the statistical map. University College was the most established centre and its importance went back to 1893 when Karl Pearson, the professor of applied mathematics, first collaborated with Raphael Weldon, the professor of zoology on a subject they called “biometry.” There was a second surge in the “English statistical school” associated with R. A. Fisher who went to work at Rothamsted in 1919."

"I wish that people would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved (by large studies); the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion."

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

"Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models."

"...the statistician knows...that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world."

"Life in financial markets has got no relation to sigmas. I mean, if everybody who had ever operated in financial markets had never had any concept of standard errors, and so on, they would be a lot better off."

"Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspect of reality: statistics."

"Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you'd have told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illness you must first study statistics."

"There are no routine statistical questions, only questionable statistical routines."

"Statistics is the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty."

"I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can't collect three grains of rice from everybody."

"In our private life as in our collective life there is no other truth than a statistical one."

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

"Statistics has been the most successful information science. Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it."

"The rise of biometry in this 20th century, like that of geometry in the 3rd century before Christ, seems to mark out one of the great ages or critical periods in the advance of the human understanding."

"To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of."

"briefly, and in its most concrete form, the object of statistical methods is the reduction of data. A quantity of data, which usually by its mere bulk is incapable of entering the mind, is to be replaced by relatively few quantities which shall adequately represent the whole, or which, in other words, shall contain as much as possible, ideally the whole, of the relevant information contained in the original data."

"It is a statistical commonplace that the interpretation of a body of data requires a knowledge of how it was obtained."

"“Without Statistics and numbers, it's a mere thought of unconvincing opinions.”"

"A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's "big lie"; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you."

"Statistics is both the science of uncertainty and the technology of extracting information from data."

"Statistics are often the last refuge of the antihumanist."

"I think the essential thing if you want to be a good statistician, as opposed to being a mathematician, is to talk to people and find out what they're doing and why they're doing it."

"Most people don’t have a good understanding of just how variable statistics are, even when you are dealing with robots."

"Statistics is the art of stating in precise terms that which one does not know."

"Statistics is the study and informed application of methods for reaching conclusions about the world from fallible observations."

"Each of us has been doing statistics all his life, in the sense that each of us has been busily reaching conclusions based on empirical observations."

"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."

"Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lampposts — for support rather than illumination."

"Uncertainty is a personal matter; it is not the uncertainty but your uncertainty."

"Without the aid of statistics nothing like real medicine is possible."

"According to a University College London study (2014), 40% of women surveyed with severe mental illness had suffered rape or attempted rape in adulthood, and 53% of those had attempted suicide as a result. In the general population, 7% of women had been victims of rape or attempted rape, of whom 3% had attempted suicide. If these statistics don't sound accurate to you, your hesitation or disbelief supports another reality about rape research: Because so many individuals who survive a rape may not report a rape (for a multitude of reasons), statistics have limited meaning."

"A statistical procedure is not an automatic, mechanical truth-generating machine."

"While it is easy to lie with statistics, it is even easier to lie without them."

"A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions."

"91.7 percent of all statistics are made-up on the spot."

"In God we trust. All others must bring data."

"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose."

"The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the art of statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service."

"Average a left-hander with a right-hander and what do you get?"

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

"Although its evolution in the United States differed markedly from that of applied mathematics, statistics, too, benefited from the presence of the emigres and from the overall war effort. After a protracted period of professional differentiation from the social scientists and from the social sciences, mathematical statisticians had formed their own society, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), in 1935. By 1938, the IMS had also taken over responsibility for the Annals of Mathematical Statistics, a journal that had been founded in 1929 to serve the needs of the more mathematically and theoretically inclined statistical practitioners. Thus, when refugees like Neyman, William Feller, Mark Kac, and Abraham Wald took up positions in the United States at Berkeley, Brown, Cornell, and Columbia, respectively, they were able to participate in a young, but viable, community of mathematical statisticians."

"Numbers and stats bob in a sentimental slop, a swampy slurry of bits of hard data and buckets of mushy manipulation."

"The individual source of the statistics may easily be the weakest link. Harold Cox tells a story of his life as a young man in India. He quoted some statistics to a Judge, an Englishman, and a very good fellow. His friend said, Cox, when you are a bit older, you will not quote Indian statistics with that assurance. The Government are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the chowty dar [chowkidar] (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases."

"Thomasina: If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers? Septimus: We do. Thomasina: Then why do your shapes describe only the shapes of manufacture? Septimus: I do not know. Thomasina: Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet."

"There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up."

"The main problem with statistics is statisticians."

"The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard"

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

"The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data."

"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

"Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write."

"Statistics is a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty"

"While nothing is more uncertain than the duration of a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives."

"The bulk of statistical criticism is of the hit-and-run variety – the critic points out some real or fancied flaw and supposes that his job is done. Indeed, some critics appear to labor under the misconception that if some flaw can be found in a study, this automatically in validates the author’s conclusions. Since the critic makes no attempt to develop a tenable counterhypothesis, his performance is on a par with that of a proponent who glances at his data and then jumps to his conclusion."