Data Interpretation Quotes

God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

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 village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

Information consists of differences that make a difference.

Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle.

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

I always try and distinguish between facts and opinions.

The first lesson that you must learn is that, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

If you can't build a relationship with your customers, you're in big trouble. If you can remember the numbers from the reports and spreadsheets you spent hours poring over in your office, but you can't picture the faces of your customers - you're in big trouble.

Good policy analysis recognizes that physical truth may be poorly or incompletely known. Its objective is to evaluate, order, and structure incomplete knowledge so as to allow decisions to be made with as complete an understanding as possible of the current state of knowledge, its limitations, and its implications.

We must never let a blizzard of statistics blind us to the real lives and people behind them.

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive.

People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.

Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

Big data is indeed a buzzword but it is one that is frankly under-hyped.

Statistics is the grammar of science.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

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.

It is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

The reality is that most of the time, the more bizarre the trend, the more bogus the results.