Thomas Sowell Quotes

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

If you just look at the data, you are led to believe that things are getting better, rather than worse. That's why the fall is really precipitous, once you hit the ceiling.

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.

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.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

Statistics are like blood sausage: they are delicious until you find out how they're made.

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

Data is very important, but you have to be good at reading the data in an emotional way. If you look at a selling report, there's an emotional trend to what's selling.

You can shape statistics to make them look however you want them to.

Statistics and numbers are no good unless you have good people to analyse and then interpret their meaning and importance.

... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.

Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

Statistics do not speak for themselves.

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

Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

[Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

Data really powers everything that we do.

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

Why don't I talk about Big Data? Because I am focused on intelligent answers and not speeds and feeds. It doesn't matter if it is quick if it's the wrong answer.

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.