309 Quotes About Statistics


  • Author Charles Wheelan
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    Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.

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  • Author Charles Wheelan
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    Statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math. Judgement an integrity turn out to be surprisingly important. A detailed knowledge of statistics does not deter wrongdoing any more than a detailed knowledge of the law averts criminal behavior.

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  • Author Charles Wheelan
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    Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading.

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  • Author Charles Wheelan
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    The beauty of the normal distribution - its Michael Jordan power, finesse, and elegance - comes from the fact that we know by definition exactly what proportion of the observations in a normal distribution lie within one standard deviation of the mean (68.2 percent), within two standard deviations of the mean (95.4 percent), within three standard deviations of the mean (99.7 percent), and so on.

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  • Author David Spiegelhalter
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    [Adolphe Quetelet] developed the idea of 'social physics', since the regularity of societal statistics seemed to reflect an almost mechanistic underlying process. Just as the random molecules of a gas come together to make predictable physical properties, so the unpredictable workings of millions of individual lives come together to produce, for example, national suicide rates that barely change from year to year.

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  • Author Charmaine J Forde
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    I just wish that Statistics was as easy as arranging numbers in chronological order, finding the median, lower and upper quartiles, and placing them on a Box and whisker's chart

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