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Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.
Sep 17, 2025
Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.
To understand God's thoughts, one must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians
The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
61% of graduating teens have had sex, 37% will eventually have sex, and 2% become statisticians.
Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.
Figures don't lie, but liars figure.
If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.
I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't take a genious to work out that 100 million children being denied an education is ridiculous. There is nothing lost in translation here, it's obvious that's wrong.
Nothing is more destructive than the gap between people's perceptions of their own day-to-day economic well-being and what politicians and statisticians are telling them about the economy
An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.
Statistics is the grammar of science.
Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation
The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics.
Years ago a statistician might have claimed that statistics deals with the processing of data. . . to-days statistician will be more likely to say that statistics is concerned with decision making in the face of uncertainty.
The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once.
While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.
The subjectivist states his judgements, whereas the objectivist sweeps them under the carpet by calling assumptions knowledge, and he basks in the glorious objectivity of science.
Olympics are three times more likely to be employed than people of a similar age, ethnic and socioeconomic status who have not been participating. It's a correlation, not a causation as far as the statisticians go, but the fascinating question is; Is there something in participation in sports, in community-building, confidence building, self-image-building, strength building, social networking - that greatly enhance employability?
Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable.
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Statisticians estimate that crime among good golfers is lower than in any class of the community except possibly bishops.
Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides - that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist - but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development.
Good stories are not written by people who live in a city of dirty strip malls, forced to listen to the machinated opinions of lawyers, bean counters and statisticians… Good stories strong enough to love are created by those brave enough to live.
Every time I sit with our general manager at a baseball game, and there's number-cruncher and statistician guy - I'm sitting around - they start talking about stuff, and I say, 'What's that? I've never heard of that one before.
Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.
Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.
Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I'm not kidding.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
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.
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.