Nate Silver Quotes

You can't depend on polls.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

I have never had an interest in opinion polls. They are merely an indicator, that's all.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

You know, I think I'm the worst player to talk to about statistics.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

If you believe these polls, you're making a mistake.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep.

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

I've learned a long time ago not to take polls too seriously.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

I don't put too much stock in polls.

The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.

Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps.

If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.

[Coining phrase "null hypothesis"] In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the "null hypothesis," and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

Serious numbers will speak to us always.

The difference between winning nineteen games and winning twenty for a pitcher is bigger than anyone out of baseball realizes. It's the same for hitters - someone who hits .300 looks back on the guy who batted .295 and says 'tough luck buddy.

The Cards had one pitcher who won fourteen straight games in a period of twenty-four days. Then when he lost his fifteenth game 1-0, his manager fined him fifty bucks.