Statistical Reasoning Quotes

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.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

We’re not used to calculating large amounts of data. Our brains think anecdotally.

Statistics is the grammar of science.

I am not very good at statistics. I am also a poor thinker.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

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

Sometimes one must make extended conclusions from limited data.

A want of the habit of observing and an inveterate habit of taking averages are each of them often equally misleading.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

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

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . . .

I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.

The method I take to do this is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

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.

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Those who are guilty of the argumentum ad ignorantiam profess belief in something because its opposite cannot be proved ... In the realm where "prejudice" is now most an issue, it normally takes a form like this: you cannot prove by the method of statistics and quantitative measurement that men are not equal. Therefore all men are equal. ... You cannot prove again by the methods of science that one culture is higher than another. Therefore the culture of the Digger Indians is just a good as that of Muncie, Indiana, or thirteenth-century France.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

The grand assertion is that you must see the world through probability and that probability is the only guide you need.

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.

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

The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face