Quotes about statistics
page 2

“In 1872 we sent to the protected countries of Europe and to the United States of America 116,000,000 of exported manufactures. In 1882…it fell to 88,000,000. In 1892…it fell to 75,000,000. In 1902, last year, although the general exports had increased, the exports of manufactures had decreased again to 73½ millions. And the total result of this is that after 30 years you are sending 42½ millions of manufactures less to the protected countries than you did 30 years ago. Then there the neutral countries…they have fallen 3½ millions…you have lost altogether in your export of manufactures 46 millions. How is it that that has not impressed the people before? Because the change has been concealed by our statistics…You have failed to observe that the continuance of your trade is dependent entirely on British possessions. While these foreign countries have declined 46 millions your British possessions have increased 40 millions.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Glasgow (6 October 1903), quoted in The Times (7 October 1903), p. 4.
1900s

People, Change, Dependency, Country

“Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.”

Jaron Lanier (1960) American computer scientist, musician, and author

"One Half of a Manifesto," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Universe, Perfection

“A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 2, “Probability and Coincidence” (p. 35)

“An artist using statistics as a brush could paint two very different pictures of our country. One would have warning signs: increasing layoffs, rising energy prices, too many failing schools, persistent poverty, the stubborn vestiges of racism. Another picture would be full of blessings: a balanced budget, big surpluses, a military that is second to none, a country at peace with its neighbors, technology that is revolutionizing the world, and our greatest strength, concerned citizens who care for our country and care for each other.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Address to Joint Session of Congress on Administration Goals (February 2001)

World, School, Peace, Painting

“At which a diplomat from France replies: «The war? I can't find it too terrible! The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!»)”

Kurt Tucholský Französischer Witz

Darauf sagt ein Diplomat vom Quai d’Orsay: «Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!»
"Französischer Witz" (1932).

Death, War

“American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically "larger" public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 1, Equality and Efficiency, p. 23

Learning, Country

“Pobedonostev: Aha! You are very well recommended Golivinski. You are just what we need here! Russia’s bureaucracy and its state apparatus have been infiltrated by Jews. Believe me. I’ve been studying the Jewish threat.
As guardians of Christina Russia we must deal with them… but it will not be easy…they’re more intelligent and smarter than the average Russian. So how?? How??
Golivinski: Jews are clever but it can be done by means of their own methods… by philisophical writings, news items…and such!
Pobedonostev: Precisely!
Golivinski: For example, we could influence the readers of our Russian newspapers by planting anti-jew articles in their columns…written in the paper’s style,’’’ of course!
and we could even publish a fake newspaper that will print news about Jewish activity!
Pobedonostev: Brilliant, my boy…come, I will assign you at once to my press chief, Mikhail Soloviev!
Soloviev, I have a young assistant for you, his name Mathieu Golovinski!
Soloviev: I can use help!
I hope he’s clever. Thank you, Pobedonostev…
Now, Golovinski, to begin with…I hate jews. They are a sly race whop will creep in and destroy the purity of our Russian culture!
So, I want you to write me a piece on this subject…and make sure it makes a clear case!
Golivinski: Excuse me sir!
Soloviev:Back so soon? What is it Golovinski?
Golovinski: Here is the article you asked for
Soloviev: In only one hour? Let em read it.
Where did you get these official statistics?
Golivinski: Oh, I made them up! No one would dare to challenge them.
Soloviev: Good work! From here on you will write for our regular campaign against the new modernization!
Golvinski: Why that?
Soloviev: All liberal, capitalistic, socialistic movements are directed by jews. We must expose them.
They are the anti-christ!
Golivinski: But sir, shouldn’t we keep this political?
Soloviev: In Russia religion and politics are the same!
Our people will believe anything negative about the Jews! Go ahead boy!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 42-48

Hate, People, Religion, Hope

“The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in statistics, would read such a statement as "I will probably be dead in eight months" - the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn't so, and since attitude matters so much.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

The Median Isn't the Message (1985)

People, Problem, Reading, Training

“I was asked to make a report on the Italian situation to this special committee of the 'gas cell', which made it clear to me that I was to stick to the statistical facts (steel production etc.) and above all not to get involved with ideology. I couldn't do it.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of André Breton, from his Second Manifesto of Surrealism 1930; as quoted in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane; Ann Arbor 1972, p. 143
Breton was unable to join a worker's cell in Paris as part of his induction into the French Communist Party, as he admitted in 1929
1920's

“The statistical study presented in the following pages may be best defined as an attempt to construct, on the basis of available statistical materials, a Tableau Economique of the United States for 1919 and 1929. One hundred and fifty years ago, when Quesnay first published his famous scheme, his contemporaries and disciples acclaimed it as the greatest discovery since Newton’s laws. The idea of general interdepence among the various part of the economic system has become by now the very foundation of economic analysis. Yet, when it comes to the practical application of this theoretical tool, modern economists must rely exactly as Quesnay did upon fictitious numerical examples.”

Wassily Leontief (1906–1999) Russian economist

Source: Structure of American economy, 1919-1929, 1941, p. 9.

Law, Idea, Study, Parting

“But no matter what safety steps we take or what security precautions we adopt, our risk of death is not approximately – but exactly – 100 percent. There is no margin of error on the statistic.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 40

Death, Error

“In the absence of social awareness and appreciation of the scientiﬁc objectivity among sufficiently large number of civil servants or political leaders, the need of validity has not yet been accepted in the ofﬁcial tatistical system in India. Ofcial statistics in India is treated as an integral part of the dministrative system which is regulated by the principle of authority. Approval of statistical estimates at a high level of authority is accepted as a bstitnte for validity in many ases there is continuing opposition to independent cross-hccks for the validity of the data. Ofﬁcials have the feeling that two independent estimates, which might differ would be confusing and, in fact unthinkable; therefore independent cross-checks in statistics should be eliminated.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

Feeling, Parting

“We have a large reservoir of engineers (and scientists) with a vast background of engineering know how. They need to learn statistical methods that can tap into the knowledge. Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress…”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Statement of 1992, quoted in Introduction to Statistical Experimental Design — What is it? Why and Where is it Useful? (2002) Johan Trygg & Svante Wold

Knowledge, Learning

“I want to emphasize that all of these examples, statistics and conclusions are drawn directly from the exhaustive Findings Report that the Department of Justice has released. Clearly, these findings – and others included in the report – demonstrate that, although some community perceptions of Michael Brown’s tragic death may not have been accurate, the widespread conditions that these perceptions were based upon, and the climate that gave rise to them, were all too real.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Death, Justice, Communication

“The application of scientific formulations of the principle of probability statistically determined is thus a logical corollary of the principle already stated, that the subject matter of scientific findings is relational, not individual. It is for this reason that it is safe to predict the ultimate triumph of the statistical doctrine.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

“Because certain elements of geometry have for a long time been included in the general course of education, every educated man is able to distinguish between the practical task of the land surveyor and the theoretical investigation of the geometer. The corresponding distinction between the theory of probability and statistics has yet to be recognized.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Second Lecture, The Elements of the Theory of Probability, p. 32
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Education, Time

“Research in statistical theory and techniques is necessarily mathematical, scholarly, and abstract in character, requiring some degree of leisure, detachment, and access to a good mathematical and historical library. The importance of continuing such research is very great, though it is not always obvious to those whose interest is entirely in practical applications of already existing theory. Excepting in the presence of active research in pure science, the application of the science tend to drop into a deadly rut of unthinking routine, incapable of progress beyond a limited range predetermined by the accomplishments of pure science, and are in constant danger of falling into the hands of people who do not really understand the tools that they are working with and who are out of touch with those that do. … It is in fact rather absurd, though quite in line with the precedents of earlier centuries, that scientific men of the highest talents can live only by doing work that could be done by others of lesser special abilities, while the real worth of their most important work receives no official recognition.”

Harold Hotelling (1895–1973) American economist and statistician

Men, People, Mathematics, Understanding

“[Medical] science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. … The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: The word "health" does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Death, Health, Disease, Art

“We had to be able to make a decision like that, without reprocessing all of our learning. So we take a small slice of information and a profile of the customer, set up a promotion, prime up the customer's history, and wait for the events. It primes up just the right amount of information in real time… [A system like that, ] might not be as precise, but it would be statistically good enough. Maybe it would be wrong five percent of the time, but that's okay. It would be more like making judgment calls.”

Sumit Chowdhury (1969) Indian writer and businessman

Source: Vivek Ranadive, ‎Kevin Maney (2011) The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future--Just Enough. p. 109-10

History, Decision, Learning, Time

“Two important features in the modern development of economics are the application of mathematics to abstract economic reasoning… and the attempt at placing economics on a numerical and experimental basis by an intensive study of economic statistics.
Both these developments have a common characteristic: they emphasize the quantitative character of economics. This quantitative movement in our estimation is one of the most promising developments in modern economics. We also consider it important that the two aspects of the quantitative method referred to should be furthered, developed, and studied jointly as two integrating parts of economics.
We therefore venture to propose the establishment of an international periodical devoted to the advancement of the quantitative study of economic phenomena, and especially to the development of a closer relation between pure economics and economic statistics.
We believe that the scope of the new journal would be happily suggested if it is called "Oekonometrika."”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Accordingly, the quantitative study of economic phenomena here considered may be termed econometrics. Frisch (1927) as quoted in Divisia 1953, pp.24-25; Cited in: Bjerkholt, Olav. " Ragnar Frisch and the foundation of the Econometric Society and Econometrica http://www.ssb.no/a/histstat/doc/doc_199509.pdf." ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY MONOGRAPHS 31 (1998): 26-57. Lead paragraph of a memorandum on the importance of establishing the journal "Oekonometrika" 1920

Mathematics, Study, Parting

“Now, what is the policy? It is, so far as we know, to interfere with the established fiscal policy of this country in order to promote the union of the Empire—that is to say, it is to affect gravely, if not to sap, the foundations of the edifice in order to promote the stability of the structure. (Laughter and cheers)…Had free trade failed us in the 57 years of experience we have had of it, had we found ourselves with a shrinking trade, a diminished revenue, a population on the verge of poverty, we should long ago have reviewed the whole system of free trade and reconsidered it. But we find ourselves, so far as all statistics can give us a clue, at a pinnacle of wealth such as no nation of the size has ever reached in the history of the world…The Empire is built up on free trade…your Empire is founded on the condition, and it could not have existed until now except on that condition, that every self-governing part of it shall have the right to work out its own prosperity by its own methods. I do not know why it should enter the heads of any statesman to deny that liberty to the United Kingdom.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Speech to the Liberal League on 12 June 1903, repudiating Chamberlain's proposals, reported in The Times (13 June 1903), p. 8.

World, History, Laughter, Parting

“Statistics are silly unless given context. If you have one foot in fire, the other in ice, can we legitimately say that, on average, you're warm? Hardly. Probabilities, in this case the chance that any one of us will die-by-Muslim, are statistically insignificant—unless this happens to you or to yours, to me or mine.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

2010s, 2017

Chance

“The next day, I called one of them and asked if I could come to his office to discuss the briefing. Fine with him, so off I went. I sat down and asked him a question: “Norm, how did you decide so exactly where the bomb would explode?” He looked at me as if I were a country bumpkin and explained how SAC calculated its bombing accuracy and he had gotten the accuracy of this particular drop straight from the horse’s mouth. Now I don’t want to bore you with how SAC arrived at planning estimates for the delivery accuracy of its nuclear bombers, except to say that it was a statistical process based on thousands of practice sorties, whose results would be mathematically analyzed to allow estimates to be made of the results of a large bombing campaign; not one bomber flying over one city and one bombardier, with the lives of perhaps millions of Muscovites at his fingertips, dropping one bomb. This I pointed out to Norm, implying that he had gone to all that fuss and bother for naught. His response was that in doing his calculations as a mathematician, he was going by the accepted ground rules. The bombing accuracy he had assumed had been provided to him by others. His was not to reason why.”

Samuel T. Cohen (1921–2010) American physicist

F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

Mathematics, Question, Horse, Flying

“I came to MIT from Harvard University, where I was a lecturer. I had been at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II and stayed on at Harvard as a lecturer, mainly doing research, but also a little bit of teaching—statistics and physiological psychology—subjects like that.
Then there came a time that I thought that I had better go pay attention to my career. I had just been having a marvelous time there. I am not a good looker for jobs; I just came to the nearest place I could, which was in our city. I arranged to come down here and start up a psychology section, which we hoped would eventually become a psychology department. For the purposes of having a base of some kind I was in the Electrical Engineering Department. I even taught a little bit of electrical engineering.
I fell in love with the summer study process that MIT had. They had one on undersea warfare and overseas transport—a thing called Project Hartwell. I really liked that. It was getting physicists, mathematicians—everybody who could contribute—to work very intensively for a period of two or three months. After Hartwell there was a project called Project Charles, which was actually two years long (two summers and the time in between). It was on air defense. I was a member of that study. They needed one psychologist and 20 physicists. That led to the creation of the Lincoln Laboratory. It got started immediately as the applied section of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, which was already a growing concern at MIT.”

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990) American psychologist and computer scientist

Licklider in: " An Interview with J. C. R. LICKLIDER http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107436/1/oh150jcl.pdf" conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg on 28 October 1988, Cambridge, MA.

Love, War, World, Hope

“You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

David Lloyd George
Misattributed

“I consider that Curie's Principle has two major consequences:
First: It shows that the class of processes which can be isolated for causal representation, not requiring the inference of external causes, is wider than the class of energetically closed systems. One-way processes in which the system loses energy can be isolable, in the sense that they can be given complete representation without taking their environment into account.
Second: It suggests the possibility of a geometrical physics treating 3D spatial relations, i. e., angles or lengths, as primary. Just as statistical mechanics, the theory of crystal symmetry, and Group theory in quantum mechanics, are useful without assumptions about forces, so Curie's principle, with an appropriate model, can determine the path of a one-way process without such assumptions…”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Pierre Curie's Principle of One Way-Process (1970)

Way, Sense

“It is some improvement that for married couples – or male-female couples in general – the fertility indicator expressing the nation’s demographic situation has risen from 1.2 to 1.44, and this is promising, but 1.44 is still very far from 2. In order to feel safe demographically, the average statistical ratio of children to Hungarian couples should be 2.1. In practice this is hard to implement, but this is the average figure we should have. Until we reach that point, Hungarians must be seen as an endangered species demographically; and the people – but the Government above all – should understand the imperative which is implicit in this.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Children, People, Feeling, Understanding

“Engineers, scientists, and statisticians have, until recently, been the groups chiefly interested in activity called quality control. These technologists have been primarily concerned with the technical methods which have become associated with the subject. They have applied these methods to a number of industrial quality problems.
Excellent results in improving quality and in reducing costs are now being reported from these applications. These reports have generated growing interest by industrial managers in the potentialities of quality control as a business method.
What, management is asking, is meant by the term "quality control"? Is there anything really new about it? What are the quality-control activities? What is the proper organization for quality control? How much does the program cost, and what benefits can result from it? Is quality control good only for mass production? May it be useful in a job shop as well? How do statistical methods fit into the quality-control pattern? What does quality control mean to the foreman, to the design engineer, to the salesman? How is quality control introduced to a company?”

Armand V. Feigenbaum (1922–2014) American businessman

Source: Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration. 1951, p. vii; Preface: lead paragraph

Business, Problem

“Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street.”

William Shockley (1910–1989) American physicist and inventor

As quoted in "Shockley's Race View called 'Senile, Fascist'" in St. Petersburg Times (8 September 1971) http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19710908&id=sewNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vnUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4930,1230689

Color, Nature

“I don't believe in marriage, myself. It's an arbitrary human concept with no reality beyond that. It isn't always necessarily romantic; it is often political. Even if you believe in God, and swear to love one another for better or worse, till death do you part, none of that is assured. In fact, evangelicals are statistically more likely to get divorced than people with no religion.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Biblical Family Values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bldw8X5apnY (July 11, 2015)

Love, Death, God, Marriage

“The fact must be expressed as data, but there is a problem in that the correct data is difficult to catch. So that I always say "When you see the data, doubt it!" "When you see the measurement instrument, doubt it!… For example, if the methods such as sampling, measurement, testing and chemical analysis methods were incorrect, data… to measure true characteristics and in an unavoidable case, using statistical sensory test and express them as data.”

Kaoru Ishikawa (1915–1989) Japanese business theorist

Kaoru Ishikawa in: Annual Quality Congress Transactions, (1981), p. 130

Problem

“A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.”

Alastair Reynolds book Diamond Dogs

Turquoise Days, Chapter 1 (p. 188)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

Science, Parting, Personality

“This deeply alarming statistic points to one of the most pernicious aspects of the conduct our investigation uncovered: that these policing practices disproportionately harm African American residents. In fact, our review of the evidence found no alternative explanation for the disproportionate impact on African American residents other than implicit and explicit racial bias.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

“The engineer must be able not only to design, but to execute. A draftsman may be able to design, but unless he is able to execute his designs to successful operation he cannot be classed as an engineer. The production engineer must be able to execute his work as he has planned it. This requires two qualifications in addition to technical engineering ability: He must know men, and he must have creative ability in applying good statistical, accounting, and " system" methods to any particular production work he may undertake.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Source: "Industrial Engineering," 1905, p. 67

Men, Success

“At the present we have no adequate scientific method for representing the psychological life span. In accord with the general methods of psychology, the study of environmental influences began with classification and statistics… they gave us excellent descriptions of the home environment. The method of representation is partly akin to that of the novelist i. e., one trying to make as lifelike picture of the situation as possible by choosing expressive words and bringing out significant traits with examples. In general, the descriptions that have been made valuable to science have not been those made by scientific methods. Where theoretical concepts have been introduced with the concrete description, they often stand out as something alien. In stead of scientific descriptions they are nothing more than speculative interpretation.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 12-13.

Life, Home, Study, Science

“I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone — the chances that all the functions of an individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.”

George Gallup (1901–1984) American statistician

Quoted in http://books.google.com/books?id=ck6bXqt5shkC&q=&quot;I+could+prove+God+statistically&quot;&pg=PA298#v=onepage Readers Digest (October 1943)

God, Chance

“The customer is usually wrong; but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so.”

Aleister Crowley book Magick Without Tears

Ch XXI.
Magick Without Tears (1954)

“It is possible to apply statistical methods to the calculation of nuclear processes provided that the energies involved are large in comparison with the lowest excitation energies of nuclei.”

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (1908–2002) Austrian-born American theoretical physicist

[V. Weisskopf, Statistics and nuclear reactions, Physical Review, 52, 4, 1937, 295–303, https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.52.295]

“[Ramsay MacDonald was] a man of great stature, capable of inspiring massive affection and massive attack—a man who created and led a great party and who has become a legend in that party equally for the manner of his leaving it as for the years he gave its creation. … They drew their inspiration from Merrie England and dry statistics, they sang their widely differing battle songs, and Ramsay MacDonald had to fashion from the strains of Edward Carpenter's 'England Arise', from the 'Internationale', from 'Jerusalem', from the 'Red Flag', from 'These Things Shall Be', a new harmony. In 1906 in MacDonald's fortieth year, he saw the victory—the dawn of the new era.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at a luncheon in the House of Commons to commemorate the centenary of Ramsay MacDonald's birth (12 October 1966), quoted in The Times (13 October 1966), p. 12.
Prime Minister

Fashion, Victory

“… we’re not all the same. A common liberal refrain … is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don’t see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That’s liberal logic for you.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“The Kindness of (Caucasian) Strangers” http://barelyablog.com/the-kindness-of-caucasian-stangers, Barely A Blog, January 31, 2014. 2010s, 2014

“Training in listening, in statistical techniques and problem cause-and-effect analysis, in group problem solving, in sophisticated financial analysis (for everyone)—and then constant retraining, for upgrading and learning new skills—simply must become the norm, for realtor, banker, or high-tech wizard.”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

March 14, 2016
Tom Peters Daily, Weekly Quote

Problem, Learning, Training

“It is not necessary to think of gambling places; the statistician who applies statistical tests is engaged in a dignified sort of gambling, and in his case the distribution of the random variables changes from occasion to occasion.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter X, Law Of large Numbers, p. 253.

Thinking, Change

“Probability and statistics are now so obviously necessary tools for understanding many diverse things that we must not ignore them even for the average student.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Understanding

“The quantum theory, as it is now constituted, presents us with a very great challenge, if we are at all interested in such a venture, for in quantum physics there is no consistent notion at all of what the reality may be that underlies the universal constitution and structure of matter. Thus, if we try to use the prevailing world view based on the notions of particles, we discover that the 'particles' (such as electrons) can also manifest as waves, that they move discontinuously, that there are no laws at all that apply in detail to the actual movements of individual particles and that only statistical predictions can be made about large aggregates of such particles. If on the other hand we apply the world view in which the world is regarded as a continuous field, we find that this field must also be discontinuous, as well as particle-like, and that it is as undermined in its actual behaviour as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole.”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)

World, Law, Reality, Universe

“Yet scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone.Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the £740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe. Why don't the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers would evaporate and bang go the ratings?Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

[Human gullibility beyond belief,— the “paranormal” in the media, The Sunday Times, 1996-08-25]

Truth, Secret, Feeling, Decision

“No scientist is as model minded as is the statistician; in no other branch of science is the word model as often and consciously used as in statistics.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. 79; Part of the article "Models in applied probability", published earlier in Synthese, 12 (1960), p. 204-210.

Science

“(Television) A recent study concludes that women over 40 have statistically as much chance of getting killed by a terrorist as of getting married. (Sylvia) And would rather.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 28

Women, Study, Chance

“There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 15, "Causes trump statistics", page 174 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Thinking

“Donald Trump: Oh, well, if you look at the statistics, of people coming— I didn't say about Mexic— I say the illegal immigrants— if you look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything, coming in illegally into this country, they're mind-boggling. If you go to Fusion, you will see a story about 80% of the women coming in– I mean, you have to take a look at these stories. And you know who owns Fusion? Univision. It was in The Huffington Post. I said, let me get some of these articles because I've heard some horrible things. I deal a lot of talking with people on the border patrol. They're incredible people. They help our country.
Don Lemon: But I want some clarification–
Trump: No, but Don, all you have to do is go to Fusion and pick up the stories on rape, and it's unbelievable when you look at what's going on. So all I'm doing is telling the truth.
Lemon: I've read The Washington Post, I read the Fusion, I read The Huffington Post. And that's about women being raped, it's not about criminals coming across the border entering the country.
Trump: Somebody's doing the raping, Don, I mean, you know– I mean, somebody's doing it. You think it's women being raped, well who's doing the raping? Who's doing the raping? I mean how can you say such a thing. So, the problem is you have to stop illegal immigration coming across the border. You have to create a strong border. If you don't, we don't have a country.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2015-07-01 The Situation Room TV CNN http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/01/politics/donald-trump-immigrants-raping-comments/
2010s, 2015

Problem, Thinking, Reading, Strong

“I approached the problem of utility measurement in 1923 during a stay in Paris. There were three objects I had in view :
:(I) To point out the choice axioms that are implied when we think of utility as a quantity, and to define utility in a rigorous way by starting from a set of such axioms;
:(II) To develop a method of measuring utility statistically;
:(III) To apply the method to actual data.
The results of my study along these lines are contained in a paper “Sur un Problème d’Économic Pure”, published in the Series Norsk Matematisk Forenings Skrifter, Serie I, Nr 16, 1926. In this paper, the axiomatics are worked out so far as the static utility concept is concerned. The method of measurement developed is the method of isoquants, which is also outlined in Section 4 below. The statistical data to which the method was applied were sales and price statistics collected by the “Union des Coopérateurs Parisien”. From these data I constructed what I believe can be considered the marginal utility curve of money for the “average” member of the group of people forming the customers of the union. To my knowledge, this is the first marginal utility curve of money ever published.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1932) New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility. Mohr, Tübingen. p. 2-3: Quoted in: Dagsvik, John K., Steinar Strøm, and Zhiyang Jia. " A stochastic model for the utility of income http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp358.pdf." (2003). 1930s

Money, People, Way, Knowledge

“There are two suffixes in our language (and similar ones in other European languages) which suggest organized knowledge. One is the venerable, academic "ology," that reminds one of university curricula and scholarship. The other is the energetic and somewhat mysterious "ics," which has a connotative flavor of magic. Where "ology" suggests academic isolation (ichthyology, philology) "its" suggests a method of attack on life’s problems. It contains a faint throwback to the ancient dreams of the philosopher’s stone and of "keys" to the riddles of the universe. Ancient words ending in "ics" are mathematics and metaphysics. Of more recent origin are economics, statistics, semantics, and cybernetics.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123) lead paragraph
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

Life, Dreams, Mathematics, Knowledge

“Objective' analysis is a tool, primarily useful for suggesting or confirming putative relationships between different musical styles….'Critical' analysis results not in a statistical measurement of style or proof of relationship but rather, ideally, in a formal model for a relatively independent and artistically controllable style within a culture, and should then be viable for accounting for individual manifestations of that style…”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Music

“The Koran tells Muslims to hate Jews because they're Jews, not because of Palestine. It doesn't mention the Palestinians. And if Israel disappeared tomorrow, Jews in Sweden and all over Europe would still be harassed and abused by ignorant hate-filled Muslim immigrants for being Jews, and for no other reason. And then all you multicultural dhimmis-in-waiting would have to find another mealy-mouthed excuse to look the other way. Fortunately for Jews, they've had a lot of practice at taking abuse and they've got fairly broad shoulders, which, of course, they'll need to carry around all those Nobel Prizes. Statistically a Jew is thousands of times more likely than a Muslim to win a Nobel Prize, and there can be only one reason for that, can't there? That's right, Islamophobia. Clearly the Nobel committees have an irrational prejudice against religion-induced ignorance, and they're obviously in need of some urgent cultural awareness and sensitivity training.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

Goodbye Sweden https://youtube.com/watch?v=zZtc2ma2GEQ&feature=youtu.be (1 December 2010)] 2010

Hate, Religion, Way, Time

“No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Study, Parting

“The present book is not a methodology of mathematics in the sense that I will systematically show how some teaching matter should taught; it is not even a systematic analysis of subject matter. I hardly ever refer to well-organized classroom experiments evaluated by statistical methods, nor do I cite experimental results of developmental psychology or the psychology of learning. Maybe the most striking feature is that this book contains few quotations. I will try to justify all these features.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Mathematics as an Educational Task (1973), p. v;As cited in: Ben Wilbrink (2013)

Books, Mathematics, Sense, Learning

“They shocked the American people. They shocked us. They certainly shocked me. I wasn't sure what kind of president Obama was going to be. I thought, maybe this guy is going to be a centrist-his rhetoric was centrist. His upbringing and history didn't suggest he was centrist but his rhetoric did. So I was thinking, well, we'll see. And then-bam!-out of the gates, these people had a hardcore-left agenda. We, along with the American people, were spectators while they took this government very far left, very fast. But what became so unnerving to us and the American people is that they used our rhetoric. They used the rhetoric of freedom and choice and opportunity to sell an inherently statist agenda; to sell an agenda that was completely the opposite of its rhetoric. And people started to realize that they were trying to transform the country using the rhetoric of the Right to push the substance of the Left.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

Source: Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (2010), p. 7-8

People, Guy, History, Thinking

“In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 3 (p. 11)

Mathematics, Knowledge, Universe

“With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.”

Guy Debord book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)

History

“To this I can only reply as follows: Your point of view — taken as theoretical possibility — is incontestable. For me, however, the expectation that the adequate formulation of the universal laws involves the use of all conceptual elements which are necessary for a complete description, is more natural. It is furthermore not at all surprising that, by using an incomplete description, (in the main) only statistical statements can be obtained out of such description. If it should be possible to move forward to a complete description, it is likely that the laws would represent relations among all the conceptual elements of this description which, per se, have nothing to do with statistics.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Cambridge University Press, 1949, p. 672
"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949)

Law, Nature, Universe

“…[T]ry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Only Nixon," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle492-20081109-02.html 9 November 2008.

Education, School, Disappointment

“That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, to define with theory.”

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 14, p. 184

Way

“When people talk about 'the sanctity of the individual' they mean 'the sanctity of the statistical norm.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

People

“[Neoinstitutional Economics…] theory has made an indispensable contribution in recent times to advances of understanding in this area. But it seems to me that in the economics of institutions theory is now outstripping empirical research to an excessive extent. No doubt the same could be said of other fields in economics, but there is a particular point about this one. Theoretical modelling may or may not be more difficult in this field than in others, but empirical work is confronted by a special difficulty. Because economic institutions are complex, they do not lend themselves easily to quantitative measurement. Even in the respects in which they do, the data very often are not routinely collected by national statistical offices. As a result, the statistical approach which has become the bread and butter of applied economics is not straightforwardly applicable. Examples of it do exist, the literature on the economics of slavery being perhaps the most fully developed - not surprisingly because slavery is an institution that is sharply defined. But to a large extent the empirical literature has consisted of case-studies which are interesting but not necessarily representative, together with a certain amount on legal court cases, which are almost certainly not representative. Is this the best we can do? There is a challenge here on the empirical side to economists to see what is the best way forward.”

R. C. O. Matthews (1927–2010) British economist

Way, Literature, Understanding, Study

“I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.”

George Canning (1770–1827) British statesman and politician

As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908) edited by Tryon Edwards, p. 587.

Truth

“An important object of the Journal should be the publication of papers dealing with attempts at statistical verification of the laws of economic theory, and further the publication of papers dealing with the purely abstract problems of quantitative economics, such as problems in the quantitative definition of the fundamental concepts of economics and problems in the theory of economic equilibrium.
The term equilibrium theory is here interpreted as including both the classical equilibrium theory proceeding on the lines of Walras, Pareto, and Marshall, and the more general equilibrium theory which is now beginning to grow out of the classical equilibrium theory, partly through the influence of the modern study of economic statistics. Taken in this broad sense the equilibrium problems include virtually all those fundamental problems of production, circulation, distribution and consumption, which can be made the object of a quantitative study. More precisely: The equilibrium theory in the sense here used is a body of doctrines that treats all these problems from a certain point of view, which is contrasted on one side with the verbal treatment of economic problems and on the other side with the purely empirical-statistical approach to economic problems”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1927). as quoted in: Bjerkholt, Olav, and Duo Qin. A Dynamic Approach to Economic Theory: The Yale Lectures of Ragnar Frisch. Routledge, 2010: About "Oekonometrika"
1920

Law, Problem, Sense, Study

“Statistics and information has become the lifeline in policy-making the world over. We must be at par with our neighboring countries, if not the world, to be equipped with vital and current information on world trade, events and trends.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2011/0819_escudero1.asp 2011

World, Country

“It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 15

Love, Sex, Way

“No Mr Huckabee, history –and criminal statistics- have both shown that tragedies will only increase, the more religious any society becomes. The more influence religion has over law, the lower our quality of life, and the more human rights are violated. It is true that any population of hundreds of millions will produce a proportionate percentage of sociopaths. But what we need there is more efficient provisions of mental health care –so that those suffering dementia and other disorders will be identified, treated, or isolated as need be –BEFORE they go berserk. Religion doesn’t want that either –as a matter of self-preservation. Because a fair amount of divine revelation can be cured with the same medications that treats schizophrenia. Where would the churches be if that many of their clergymen were clothed in straight-jackets?”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Life, Health, Religion, Law

“Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)… which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours:
Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines…untoward spikes in commodity prices.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 1
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

War, Reading

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a discovery machine. We are actually looking to make discoveries. So, I think that’s the name of the game. As the data come in, the emphasis will be on the high statistical significance of the statements that we make at the end of the programme – we are half way through the LHC programme today and so [there is] another 10-15 years to go. The name of the game is actually to retrieve all the physics that is at this special energy scale of the LHC. There is some magic, I think, about this energy scale.”

Tejinder Virdee (1952) British physicist

"Discovery machine; Interview with Dr. Jim Virdee," 2010

Way, Game, Thinking

“I didn't care about the statistics in anything else. I didn't, and don't pay any attention to the statistics of the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don't start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that? It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language.”

Bill James (1949) American baseball writer and statistician

1985 Baseball Abstract

Death, People, Football, Weather

“What happened this far remote would have little political impact on Earth. What the visual media could not carry into living rooms, the general public could not long remain exercised about. Statistically, a majority of the electorate could not or did not read complicated issues; no pictures, no news; no news, no event.”

C. J. Cherryh book Downbelow Station

Book 2, Chapter 2 (p. 118)
Downbelow Station (1981)

Exercises, Reading

“I think the statistics will prove that there is as much virtue among the Negroes as among the whites.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1873, Speech on Civil Rights Act (1873)

Thinking

“I don’t listen to anything on the radio but NPR and occasional oldies programs. I can’t comment on the content or format of most commercial radio but I have read the statistics about the step-by-step deregulation of FCC rules that has allowed monopolies like Clear Channel to buy up massive shares of the airwaves. This has damaged our business (music) and our culture (American). The internet is offering bold alternatives but a transistor radio is only $25.00 and not everyone is hooked up through a computer and high speed connection.”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Quotes from NatalieMerchant.com

Music, Business, Reading, Speed

“Without the state there would be anarchy for that is, despite all the perfervid ravings of the Marxist Left and statist Right, all that anarchy means—the absence of the state, the opportunity for liberty.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)

“He knew from his own experience in Singapore that the further up the ladder one got, the more the job was about politics and statistics than actually dealing with crime.”

Shamini Flint book Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 2

“Statistics should be taught early so that the concepts are absorbed by the student's flexible, adaptable mind before it is too late.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

“The field of economics is not exempt from the consequences of chaos and complexity. Marketplaces are indeterminate; value is subjective; and outcomes are subject to interpretation. Economic forecasting is just as nebulous, being based on the probability of statistical information that may or may not be accurate.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 16

“During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman's classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework - the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.
About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: "I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication." For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Dantzig (1986) in: D.J. Albers and C. Reid "An interview with George B. Dantzig : the father of linear programming". In: The College Mathematics Journal Vol 17, nr 4, 1986, p. 293-314.

Fear, Idea, Problem, Thinking

“Everyone dies—the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest.”

Michael Swanwick book Stations of the Tide

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 13, “A View from a Height” (p. 238)

“Research is something that everyone can do, and everyone ought to do. It is simply collecting information and thinking systematically about it. The word ‘research’ carries overtones of abstruse statistics and complex methods, white coats and computers. Some social research is highly specialised but most is not; much of the best research is logically very straightforward. Useful research on many problems can be done with small resources, and should be a regular part of the life of any thoughtful person involved in social action.”

Raewyn Connell (1944) Australian sociologist

Raewyn Connell et al. (1975). How to do small surveys – a guide for students in sociology, kindred industries and allied trades. School of Social Sciences. Flinders University. p. 1.

Life, Problem, Thinking, Parting

“At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You're meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them. It is, however, deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they're worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Europeans Abolished Slavery; Africans/Muslims Still Practice It." http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263735/europeans-abolished-slavery-africansmuslims-still-ilana-mercer FrontPage Magazine 8/4/016. 2010s, 2016

People, Color

“The laws which governed the spontaneous jumps of the kangaroos were shown to be of the simplest; out of any number of kangaroos a certain proportion always jumped within a specified time, and nothing seemed to be able to change this number. Also, before the jumps took place, there was nothing in the world of phenomena to distinguish those kangaroos that were about to jump from those that were not… to help fill the quota demanded by the statistical law. As discontinuity marched into the world of phenomena through one door, causality walked out through another.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

World, Law, Change, Time

“With diligent effort he has established that there is no statistical basis for Murphy’s Law. He has also established that he believes in it anyway.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 511

Law, Effort

“A homeostat constantly seeks to establish a balance which is perpetually disrupted, and performs a statistical exploration of all the possible combinations of inputs.
The actual research on the apparatus is guided by a triple determinism which integrates:
#. one element of uncertainty created by an "indifferent cell," which systematically makes use of chance;
#. one element of "sensorial reactions" which integrates the effects of the sound atmosphere, of the light atmosphere and of the heat atmosphere;
#. an "internal determinism" created by the feedbacks of the various active chains among one another, in order to liberate the machine progressively. Its degree of liberty can easily be modified.
The objective sought is above all of an experimental order. As for electronic animals, the synthesis of the faculties must be effected very gradually, and the behavior of the "models" man makes of himself must be observed. This exploration by the "models" of physiology, psychology and sociology marks the opening of a new path in research.”

Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) French sculptor and plastician

Source: André Giraud-Bours (1963). Nicolas Schöffer. p. 45 ; cited in: " 1956 – CYSP-1 – Nicolas Schöffer – (Hungarian/French) http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1956-cysp-1-nicolas-schoffer-hungarianfrench/" in: cyberneticzoo.com, 2015.

Behavior, Light, Chance, Animals

“Against all the retrogressive endeavors (Bohm, Schrödinger etc. and in some sense also Einstein) I am sure that the statistical character of the ψ-function and hence of nature’s laws – on which you insisted from the very beginning against Schrödinger’s resistance – will define the style of the laws at least for some centuries. It may be that later, e. g. in connection with the living processes, one will find something entirely new, but to dream of a way back, back to the classical style of Newton-Maxwell (and these are just dreams these gentlemen are giving themselves up to) seems to me hopeless, digressive, bad taste. And, we could add, it is not even a beautiful dream.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Max Born, December 1954, in Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg u.a, Springer, 1999, p. 887, as translated in J. Kofler and A. Zeilinger, "Quantum Information and Randomness", European Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2010, pp. 469–480

Law, Beauty, Dreams, Way

“It is common to think of statistical graphics and data visualization as relatively modern developments in statistics. In fact, the graphic representation of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into the histories of the earliest map-making and visual depiction, and later into thematic cartography, statistics and statistical graphics, medicine, and other fields. Along the way, developments in technologies (printing, reproduction) mathematical theory and practice, and empirical observation and recording, enabled the wider use of graphics and new advances in form and content.”

Michael Friendly (1945) American psychologist

Michael Friendly. " A brief history of data visualization http://www.datavis.ca/papers/hbook.pdf at datavis.ca, March 21, 2006.

Way, History, Mathematics, Thinking

“The main interest of physical statistics lies in fact not so much in the distribution of the phenomena in space, but rather in their succession in time.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Sixth Lecture, Statistical Problems in Physics, p. 187
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Time, Success

“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”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

although all my graduate training was in political science
Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.

Science, Training

“The future mathematical statistician needs early contacts with experimental sciences. He needs them because, at this stage of the development of statistics, the expeimental sciences are sources of theoretical problems. Also, he needs them because in almost any imaginable job which he may get after graduation, he will be called upon to apply his theory to experimental or observational problems.”

Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) Polish statistician

Proceedings of the Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability. Vol. 1. http://books.google.com/books?id=p2T2bxyDSLMC&pg=PA48 University of California Press, 1949, p. 48.

Imagination, Mathematics, Problem, Science

“Finally it should be noted that the picture education, especially the pictorial statistics, are of international importance. Words carry more emotional elements than set pictures, which can be observed by people of different countries, different parties without any protest; Words divide, pictures unite.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Otto Neurath (1931), "Bildstatistik nach Wiener Methode", Die Volksschule 27 (1931): 569 ; Translated and cited in Sybilla Nikolow (2013) "‘Words Divide, Pictures Unite.’Otto Neurath’s Pictorial Statistics in Historical Context."
1930s

People, Education, Country

“The spirit and outlook of 'Sankhya' will be universal, but its form and content must necessarily be, to some extent, regional. We shall keep the special needs of India in view without, however, restricting the scope of the journal in any way. We shall naturally devote closer attention to the collection and analysis of data relating to India, but we shall try to study all Indian questions in relation to world problems…. The study of modern statistical methods in its infancy in our country, and we do not expect to be able to achieve immediate results. We shall be satisfied if we can help by our humble efforts to lay the foundations for future work.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

His editorial in his Journal the Sankhya cited in Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 14 December 2013, School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Mahalanobis.html, Quote

World, Way, Question, Nature

“Well, I'd say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that's the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that. The governor of the Bank of England seems to have forgotten or not known that there was no bank insurance in England, so when Northern Rock got a run, he was surprised. Well, he shouldn't have been.
But history doesn't tell its own story. You've got to bring to it all the statistical testings that are possible. And we have a lot more information now than we used to.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Conor Clarke, An Interview With Paul Samuelson http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/an-interview-with-paul-samuelson-part-two/19627/, Part Two (2009) New millennium

History, Thinking, Study, Change

“The object of this paper is fivefold. The first objective is to derive a practical system of demand equations which possess properties usually considered desirable from the standpoint of elementary economic theory. The second is to consider the statistical problems involved in applying the system of equations. The third is to analyse the pattern of demand for consumers' goods in terms of this system on the basis of annual data relating to the United Kingdom over the years 1920-38. The fourth is to compare the results of this system, and systems like it, with the actual state of demand in 1900. Finally, the fifth is to compare the post-war structure of demand with what might be expected from the inter-war relationshipp under free-market condition.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Stone, Richard. " Linear expenditure systems and demand analysis: an application to the pattern of British demand http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2227743?uid=3738736&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104302232953." The Economic Journal (1954): 511-527.

War, Problem

“Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 12, Political Arithmetic, p. 102.

Study

“Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. […] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Beware of Liberals in Libertarian Drag" http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/beware-of-liberals-in-libertarian-drag/ WorldNetDaily.com, November 7, 2013. 2010s, 2013

Imagination, Freedom, Fight

“The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what's happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

The Clerk's Vision (1949)

Death, Tree

“As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at the edge of chaos.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Statistical Mentality" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052233/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/522/statistical-mentality (2011)

Mathematics, Nature, Science

“Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence. Irony is "a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result." For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony. If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Hussein's army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large. Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Books, Brain Droppings (1997)

Way, Mountain, Football

“I was watching the news reports from Baltimore and hearing all the condemnations from some about being kept down and the lack of jobs, opportunity, good schools — then why do these blacks keep voting for the same people? And this isn't a phenomenon isolated to Baltimore. Every single major urban center in America is run by Democrats — more specifically, liberal progressives, black or white. The morass that became Detroit. The killing fields of Chicago. The depravity of Washington, D. C. The shame of South Dallas. And yes, even the place that was once my home, Atlanta, even with all the successful black entertainers. Now, I remember the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson. That guy was a leader and even spoke at my high school Baccalaureate. But today, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has done such a bang-up job that the Atlanta Braves are moving to Cobb County! Just do the assessment yourselves, who are the elected officials heading up the urban centers? And where does one find the most dire socio-economic statistics?”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore (2015)

People, School, Guy, Home

Quotes about statistics page 2

Quotes about statistics
page 2