Statistician Quotes - Page 3

• We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

  E. M. Forster

  Poverty, Poet, Poor

  Howards End Chapter 6

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• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

  Martin Rees

  Science, Vastness, Ontology

  Quoted in Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, rev. ed., ed. B. M. Oliver and J. Billingham (1973). An earlier version by A. R. Burn appeared in a book review by Burn in The Classical Review, June 1969: "absence of evidence is not identical with evidence of absence."

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• [Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

  Francis Galton

  Cutting, Math, Men

  Natural Inheritance Normal Variability (pp. 62-3)

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• 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.

  Mark Twain

  Motivational, Cute, Truth

  Mark Twain (2014). “Mark Twain on Common Sense: Timeless Advice and Words of Wisdom from America's Most-Revered Humorist”, p.12, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• The median isn't the message.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Messages, Median

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.233, Harvard University Press

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• What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.

  Harold Jeffreys

  Science, Use, Levels

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• All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

  John Tukey

  Different, Asking, World

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• 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.

  I. J. Good

  Objectivity, Judgement, Calling

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• 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.'

  Claude Shannon

  Names, Ideas, Two

  "Scientific American", Vol. 225, (p. 180), 1971.

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• A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Witty, Math, Science

  Chartism ch. 2 (1839) See Disraeli 38

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• It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Mistake, Math, Science

  "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)

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• Finding oil is a multidisciplinary science. You need a lot of people - statisticians, engineers, and geologists, of course. And what I have learned in the past 30 years is that I read people better than I read books.

  Eike Batista

  Book, Past, Years

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• I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).

  Lloyd deMause

  Years, Political, Ignorant

  Lloyd DeMause (1975). “The New Psychohistory”, New York : Psychohistory Press

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• ...while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Men, Statistics, Individual

  Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Watson in The Sign of Four (1890).

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• 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

  Nicolas Sarkozy

  People, Perception, Gaps

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• 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?

  Timothy Shriver

  Sports, Self, People

  Source: abilitymagazine.com

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• One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.

  Paul Theroux

  Weather, Cold, One Thing

  Paul Theroux (2014). “The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There are nature and nurture components to virtually every behavior a human experiences. The research effort lies only in finding the relevant percentages, not on some absolute value. That's one of the reasons behavioral scientists have to be really good statisticians.

  John Medina

  Lying, Effort, Research

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Years

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.60, Ballantine Books

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• The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.

  Ronald Fisher

  Responsibility, Understanding, Process

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• I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

  Friedrich Engels

  Together, Balzac, I Have Learned

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• 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.

  Francis Galton

  Lakes, Views, Average

  Natural Inheritance The Charms of Statistics (p. 62)

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• Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

  James Thurber

  Men, Greed, Want

  James Thurber (1956). “Further fables for our time”

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• Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

  Rob Lowe

  Sampling, Way, Census

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• I may remark parenthetically that the modern apparatus of the theory of small samples, once it goes beyond the determination of its own specially defined parameters and becomes a method for positive statistical inference in new cases, does not inspire me with any confidence unless it is applied by a statistician by whom the main elements of the dynamics of the situation are either explicitly known or implicitly felt.

  Norbert Wiener

  Determination, Inspire, May

  Norbert Wiener (1961). “Cybernetics Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”, p.25, MIT Press

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