“To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.”

— Ronald Fisher

"Presidential Address to the First Indian Statistical Congress" https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/decision/1938-fisher.pdf, 1938. Sankhya 4, 14-17. <br class="br">1930s

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Ronald Fisher28

English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, a… 1890–1962

Ian Stevenson (1918–2007) Canadian parapsychologist, reincarnation researcher

Survival of death with such an appalling decay of personality makes it, at least to me, a rather unattractive prospect.
Return to Life, p. 13 by Jim Tucker

“Experience can be merely the repetition of same error often enough.”

John G. Azzopardi (1929–2013)

Problems in Breast Pathology, W.B. Saunders Company Ltd London . Philadelphia - Toronto 1979, p. 113
Prof. Azzopardi was speaking about subtle problems in diagnosis of carcinoma of the breast, but his observation has a much larger significance.

“If a manager asks an academic consultant what to do and that consultant answers, then the consultant should be fired. No academic has the experience to know the context of a managerial problem well enough to give specific advice about a specific situation.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

On academic consultants.
Ideas as Art (2006)

“Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Source: Love Bites

“If the vapid writings… did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities. (Survival of death with such an appalling decay of personality makes it, at least to me, a rather unattractive prospect.)”

Ian Stevenson (1918–2007) Canadian parapsychologist, reincarnation researcher

Return to Life, p. 13 by Jim Tucker

“So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.”

René Descartes book Rules for the Direction of the Mind

Rules for the Direction of the Mind: IV

“What is written is merely the dregs of experience.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“The truth was that Emerson did not often refer to Scripture (after he announced the text, which was invariably from the Bible) because the Bible was no longer for him an object of study; it was an example for him for emulation. He was interested in his own primary, personal religious experience and that of his parishioners, not in repeating and deferring to the reported religious experiences of long departed historical personages. When he studied, say, the Book of Proverbs, he no longer thought of himself as a commentator, but as the potential author of a similar book.”

Robert D. Richardson (1934) American historian

Source: Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), p. 90

“See they conducted experiments on convicts”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

Nationally syndicated column number 31, A Few Shots of Scopolamin (15 July 1923), after meeting Robert E. House, who had proposed the use of scopolamine as a truth serum, in The Use of Scopolamine in Criminology (1922).
Weekly columns
Context: See they conducted experiments on convicts... I don't know on what grounds they reason a man in jail is a bigger liar than one out of jail... The chances are telling the truth is what got him there... It would be a big aid to humanity, but it will never be, for already the politicians are up in arms against it... It would wreck the very foundation on which our political government is run... If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics … Even the ministers are denouncing it now … Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony.

“What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies with that which is here set forth.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Book I, Ch. 1 "Prelude"
Founding Address (1876), An Ethical Philosopy of Life (1918)

“To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.”

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