I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.
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.
The sheer amount of information available weirdly encourages informational overconfidence … ‘evidence’ for any belief you have — I mean any belief — can be found on the internet.
Analysis is more likely to adjust evidence than to adjust itself.
One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
And never - not in a single case - was the explanation, 'I was pressured to do this.' The explanation was very often, 'The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it.'
Whenever I see a forecast written out to two decimal places, I cannot help but wonder if there is a misunderstanding of the limitations of the data, and an illusion of precision.
The mind when it has an old experience will add that data into its current experience, and it keeps coming up with wrong answers.
