statistics

"The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, "opinion" polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense."

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

"Who are those who chucked the questionnaire into the nearest wastebasket?"

"Even if you can't find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere. There always is."

"This [the degree of significance] is the little figure that is not there—on the assumption that you, the lay reader, wouldn't understand it. Or that, where there is an axe to grind, you would."

"It is all too reminiscent of an old definition of the lecture method of classroom instruction: a process by which the contents of the textbook of the instructor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either party."

"There is terror in numbers. [...] Perhaps we suffer from a trauma induced by grade-school arithmetic."

"Nothing has been falsified—except the impression that it gives."

"If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anyone will notice the difference."

"The president of the American Statistical Association once called me down for that. Not chicanery much of the time, said he, but incompetence. There may be something in what he says, but I am not certain that one assumption will be less offensive to statisticians than the other."

"What comes full of virtue from the statistician's desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter. [...] As long as the errors remain one-sided, it is not easy to attribute them to bungling and accident."

"It's all a little like the tale of a roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. "Well," he said, "I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix 'em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit.""

""Does it make sense?" will often cut a statistic down to size when the whole rigmarole is based on an unproven assumption."

"There is some irony to the world’s most famous statistics book having been written by a person with no formal training in statistics, but there is also some logic to how this came to be. Huff had a thorough training for excellence in communication, and he had an exceptional commitment to doing things for himself. [...] In the publishing field, this is what one means by pioneering, original work."

"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."

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

"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."