Famous statistical quotations

Question

What is your favorite statistical quote?

This is community wiki, so please one quote per answer.

Should this question really be "famous quotes about statistics"? — naught101, Nov 03 '12 at 04:29

score 273 · Answer 1 · edited Jul 09 '16 at 13:19

273

All models are wrong, but some are useful. (George E. P. Box)

Reference: Box & Draper (1987), Empirical model-building and response surfaces, Wiley, p. 424.

Also: G.E.P. Box (1979), "Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building" in Robustness in Statistics (Launer & Wilkinson eds.), p. 202.

edited Jul 09 '16 at 13:19

answered Jul 27 '10 at 06:37

Rob Hyndman

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I use this quote a lot to explain the difficulties in mathematicians transitioning to statistics – user549 Jul 29 '10 at 18:48
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This sentence itself is a model (an epistemological one) – user603 Sep 10 '10 at 20:00
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but see a nice discussion around this quote on Gelman's blog, http://j.mp/9SgIBO – chl Sep 11 '10 at 10:21
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And this is an actual quote, as opposed to something "attributed to" Box. It appears, e.g., in Box & Draper (1987), *Empirical model-building and response surfaces*, Wiley, on page 424. Yes, I did go and look it up before using it in a paper. – Stephan Kolassa Oct 14 '10 at 15:53
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Sadly, too many people use it to excuse themselves from the flaws in their models. In my personal experience, it's usage is an alarm sign. – JohnRos Feb 02 '12 at 13:35
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I prefer the extended version: "...all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" (Box & Draper, 2007, "Response Surfaces, Mixtures, and Ridge Analyses", p. 414) – Tim Dec 31 '14 at 15:46
Taken out of context it is a meaningless and even misleading statement. A model helps us understand the world by simplification and by disregarding anomalies, so obviously any model is "wrong" in any literal sense of the word. Furthermore, usefulness should not generally be a criterion for model selection, e.g., a poor model ("climate change is not man made") can still be very useful for nefarious (and other) purposes. – Wicher Jan 31 '20 at 11:43

score 228 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 28 '10 at 06:55

228

"An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem." -- John Tukey

edited Jul 28 '10 at 06:55

Rob Hyndman

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 08:42

John D. Cook

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I like this one, could be put as an advise when people write questions on this site ? – robin girard Jul 27 '10 at 08:48
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Absolutely...asking the right question is one of the most important skills. – Shane Jul 27 '10 at 14:17
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I remember once where a private industry company commissioned a mathematician to solve a garbage collection routing problem. Long story short, the mathematician complained that the company was only interested in finding a "close enough" solution rather than an optimal solution. I think, ultimately he was fired, and an operations researcher was brought in instead. – dassouki Jul 27 '10 at 17:59
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@dassouki I think the quote is more about the question .... something like science is not about finding good answer but about finding good questions ! – robin girard Jul 27 '10 at 20:21
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This reminds me of a quote made by Edwin Jaynes. It roughly goes "...a mathematician came to me and said 'I found a brilliant solution, all I need now is the problem'..." – probabilityislogic Feb 05 '11 at 13:09
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"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise." John W. Tukey 1962 The future of data analysis. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33: 1-67 (see pp.13-14) No doubt he said similar things at other times, but that's a precise source, and the version I usually see quoted. – Nick Cox Apr 27 '13 at 23:02
@NickCox +1 the quote with the 'wrong question' is preferable being much clearer and less debateable than the one with 'an approximate problem'. It can be incredibly valuable solving an approximate problem exactly ( in science at least. ) – PM. Jun 07 '18 at 08:51

score 150 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 26 '15 at 21:54

150

"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."

-- Ronald Fisher (1938)

The quotation can be read on page 17 of the article.

R. A. Fisher. Presidential Address by Professor R. A. Fisher, Sc.D., F.R.S. Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933-1960), Vol. 4, No. 1 (1938), pp. 14-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40383882

edited Jul 26 '15 at 21:54

whuber

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 07:41

I read a slightly different version of this quote by Fisher: "Hiring a physician after the data have been collected is like hiring a physician when the patient is in the morgue. He may be able to tell you what went wrong, but he is unlikely to be able to fix it." – Peter Flom May 27 '11 at 18:10
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@Peter Was it really "Hiring a physician after the data ..." or should "statistician" be in there somewhere? – Dason Nov 04 '11 at 14:06
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@dason You're right! Someone edited my post, I think – Peter Flom Nov 04 '11 at 21:05

score 138 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 14 '11 at 09:38

138

87% of statistics are made up on the spot

-Unknown

Dilbert.com

edited Jan 14 '11 at 09:38

Henrik

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answered Aug 05 '10 at 02:42

Eric Petroelje

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http://imgur.com/0dsVC.gif – J. M. is not a statistician Oct 23 '10 at 11:59
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And 45.8% of people don't believe that statistic – probabilityislogic Feb 05 '11 at 13:12
ROFL ROFL Scott Adams kills me – Hack-R Apr 30 '15 at 19:44
Ha! Every time I see a forecast that contains too many significant digits I think of this quote. "The number of cell phone owners is forecast to be 4,372,138,975 by the year 2020." Really? As if anyone could forecast better than 4.3B or 4.4B. – JTP - Apologise to Monica Sep 04 '15 at 11:31

score 135 · Answer 5 · edited Jul 31 '10 at 00:19

135

In God we trust. All others must bring data.

(W. Edwards Deming)

edited Jul 31 '10 at 00:19

jpalecek

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 06:36

Rob Hyndman

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God must bring data too. – KalEl Aug 19 '10 at 09:33
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God can make up data. – Leo May 28 '11 at 04:11
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@Leo What data do you have to support that hypothesis? :) – probabilityislogic May 28 '11 at 13:23
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Ooh, is that a new version of the Omnipotence Paradox? If god made up new data, how could you prove that it wasn't there all along? – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 04:33
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It's axiomatically true. – abaumann Apr 16 '13 at 07:16
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A great quote and a great man; debatably a great quote *from* a great man. – Jack Ryan Nov 20 '13 at 12:57
Ironically there does not seem to be any data suggesting the quote belongs to Deming! – Luca Oct 19 '16 at 15:17
An attempted editor argues, "Should be B. Joiner. This is a misattribution that got multiplied because of the mistaken reference in Hastie, Tibsharni and Freedman. They never corrected it. The correct reference is Joiner, B.L. (1985). The key role of statisticians in the transformation of North American industry.American Statistician 39(3): 233–234." – gung - Reinstate Monica Sep 20 '19 at 11:40
It looks like it goes back earlier than either Deming or Joiner. See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/12/29/god-data/. – Rob Hyndman Sep 21 '19 at 01:20

score 134 · Answer 6 · edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:10

134

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

-- George Box

edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:10

shabbychef

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Thylacoleo

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score 128 · Answer 7 · edited Mar 26 '13 at 15:44

128

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

-Aaron Levenstein

edited Mar 26 '13 at 15:44

user603

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:22

jilles de wit

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And life's more fun without them? Guess you can only take a metaphor so far... – naught101 Aug 21 '13 at 02:27
This just became my favorite quote – Ali Turab Lotia Aug 30 '16 at 11:25
This maybe? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Statistics slightly different phrasing though. If you google the entire quote I'm not the only one using it, but no source. – jilles de wit Apr 26 '19 at 06:56

score 116 · Answer 8 · answered Aug 08 '10 at 23:05

116

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

-- Niels Bohr

answered Aug 08 '10 at 23:05

Meh

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Prediction about the past can also be surprisingly tricky! – walkytalky Aug 19 '10 at 07:58
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This one has been attributed to many different people http://www.larry.denenberg.com/predictions.html and it's disputed that it would be Niels Bohr http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr – gerrit Jul 25 '12 at 16:16

score 113 · Answer 9 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:01

113

If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.

--Ronald Coase (quoted from Coase, R. H. 1982. How should economists chose? American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D. C.). I think most who hear this quote misunderstand its profound message against data dredging.

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:01

shabbychef

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answered Aug 23 '10 at 13:47

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Yes, your explanation is highly needed. I can imagine that many would take away the complete opposite meaning from the quote. Note to myself, even torture of ideas is evil. – Aditya P Sep 23 '18 at 05:03
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The answer and the above comment are both cryptically hinting that this quote is frequently misinterpreted. How is it misinterpreted? Could somebody just explicitly interpret this quote if the meaning is unclear? I took the quote to mean that for example if you perform dozens of hypothesis tests on a dataset you will eventually get a small $p$-value by sheer luck. Or, in other words, you will find things that look statistically significant but which are merely flukes. Is that the correct interpretation? – littleO Sep 04 '21 at 17:05

score 108 · Answer 10 · answered Jul 29 '10 at 10:57

108

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Mark Twain

answered Jul 29 '10 at 10:57

aL3xa

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This is brilliant! – probabilityislogic Jan 19 '11 at 03:51
It is, except are there any generalisations that are entirely true? – naught101 Mar 21 '12 at 07:15
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@naught101 Definitions and the laws of nature (once we know them) are generalizations that I consider true. Though the former are not very interesting as in: all "true generalizations" are true. – ziggystar Feb 03 '13 at 15:20
Not necessarily false. It is true probabilistically. – hbadger19042 Jun 18 '20 at 00:47

score 99 · Answer 11 · edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:09

99

A big computer, a complex algorithm and a long time does not equal science.

-- Robert Gentleman

edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:09

shabbychef

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:09

Paolo

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Still it looks promising. – Jul 27 '10 at 11:20
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Just curious, where did he say/write that? – Hack-R Apr 30 '15 at 19:49

score 94 · Answer 12 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:23

94

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.

--H.G. Wells

answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:23

By God, he was right! – KalEl Aug 19 '10 at 09:32
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I don't know, you've seen many efficient citizens lately? – Raskolnikov Dec 03 '10 at 23:26
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Still waiting... – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 04:34
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An anonymous user asked for a source for this 'quote'; he/she also indicated that Gigerenzer noted that he searched Wells published output in vain for the original. – chl Apr 25 '13 at 07:00
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-source-of-the-H-G-Wells-quote-Statistical-thinking-will-one-day-be-as-necessary-for-efficient-citizenship-as-the-ability-to-read-and-write – Axle Max Nov 09 '19 at 04:50
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There's a published article that also goes into debunking this quotation. Tankard, J.W. (1979). The H.G. Wells Quote on Statistics: A Question of Accuracy. Historia Mathematica 6: 30-33. – Phil Jan 02 '20 at 11:42

score 90 · Answer 13 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 06:23

90

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

Tukey

answered Jul 27 '10 at 06:23

robin girard

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As a biological scientist, I find myself muttering this to myself during a lot of seminars... – N Brouwer Oct 18 '12 at 18:05
This should be taught in management school long before the chapter on KPI calculation – rumtscho Feb 06 '14 at 20:04

score 86 · Answer 14 · edited Aug 07 '10 at 10:09

86

There are no routine statistical questions, only questionable statistical routines.

D.R. Cox

edited Aug 07 '10 at 10:09

Jonik

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Rolf Sundberg attributed this quote to J.M. Hammersley in a 1994 article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0169-7439(93)E0041-2 – onestop Jan 28 '11 at 20:41
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The following was an attempted edit by an anonymous user: "Comment: It is told after the qoute that I have attributed this (excellent) quote to Hammersley. The reason for my attribution of it to Hammersley was that I asked David Cox before I used the quote, and he answered that it was not originally his, but Hammersley's phrasing. Rolf Sundberg". – gung - Reinstate Monica May 23 '13 at 19:51
This is wrong - evidence? - t testing and p values! routine calculations done all the time. sure it may be "questionable" but it is still routine! – probabilityislogic Jul 17 '19 at 07:01

score 84 · Answer 15 · edited Jul 27 '17 at 07:26

84

Statistics - A subject which most statisticians find difficult but which many physicians are experts on. "Stephen S. Senn"

edited Jul 27 '17 at 07:26

Zhubarb

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Credit: Stephen Senn, *Statistical Issues in Drug Development*, page4. http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/71/04700187/0470018771.pdf – onestop Nov 08 '10 at 09:03
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I think its because physics has a similar level of pedantry required for statistics, and the physicist has the huge benefit of wanting to get rid of uncertainty, the statistician just wants to describe it. – probabilityislogic Jan 30 '11 at 11:04
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Physicians \neq physicists – David Roberts Aug 18 '11 at 01:14
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This may be my new favorite – Fomite Jul 22 '12 at 21:51
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Although I could imagine this applying to physicists as well. – WetlabStudent Feb 07 '14 at 01:16

score 80 · Answer 16 · edited Jul 10 '16 at 03:35

80

A nice one I came about:

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

By Richard Feynman (link)

edited Jul 10 '16 at 03:35

answered Jul 31 '10 at 15:36

Tal Galili

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If I was a betting man I'd say Richard Feynman was an agnostic – probabilityislogic Jan 30 '11 at 10:48
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Does Feynman qualify as a statistician? – Glen_b Nov 03 '12 at 06:59
Nice one but Thomas Gray puts it better "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." – Marco Stamazza Dec 13 '17 at 09:26
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@Glen_b Actually the question is "What is your favorite statistical quote?" not "What is your favorite quote of a statician?" – Jul 23 '19 at 07:20
As far as I can see the intent of the quote is not statistical either. – Glen_b Jul 23 '19 at 08:58
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I like this one a lot: *"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer."* - Richard Feynman – DifferentialPleiometry Jan 21 '22 at 19:05
I agree the intent is not statistical. But I find it to be rather tied to our field. – Tal Galili Jan 21 '22 at 19:31

score 80 · Answer 17 · edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:11

80

He uses statistics like a drunken man uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.

-- Andrew Lang

edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:11

shabbychef

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Neil McGuigan

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score 78 · Answer 18 · edited Aug 07 '10 at 10:08

78

Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring.

-- Charlie Chan

edited Aug 07 '10 at 10:08

Jonik

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ars

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I don't mind the down vote, but I maintain that this is a deep statistical point, not to be taken lightly. ;-) – ars Jul 27 '10 at 07:18
Especially if you are in the financial services sector. – DWin Jan 18 '11 at 22:21
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I would say that the key to cracking the meaning of this quote is to recognise that the word "strange" is relative to what your model of "normal" is. – probabilityislogic Feb 05 '11 at 13:11
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I this just a verbose way of saying "outliers happen", or is there something deeper I'm missing? – naught101 Feb 07 '14 at 02:14
A similar quote that I like is “With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen" (Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller). – MattBagg Feb 13 '15 at 01:34

score 76 · Answer 19 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:02

76

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

-- John Tukey

(This is MY favourite Tukey quote)

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:02

shabbychef

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answered Aug 06 '10 at 01:08

Thylacoleo

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Love this one -- a wonderful bonus of being a statistician. – Kingsford Jones Sep 11 '10 at 17:13
I'm unsure what this one means. Is that because statistics applies to almost every field? – Ali Turab Lotia Aug 30 '16 at 11:42
@Ali, I believe that's the general intent. Statistics can be a very powerful epistemological framework which has found use in multiple fields with extremely complex systems (biology, economics, epidemiology, climate science, etc). – Ashe Sep 16 '16 at 18:17
This is precisely why I got into the field, i'm nosy! – adunaic Oct 14 '16 at 19:58

score 68 · Answer 20 · edited Jul 16 '19 at 22:06

68

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

–Martin Rees (Wikipedia)

edited Jul 16 '19 at 22:06

Nat

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answered Jul 28 '10 at 06:49

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Good quote, but it's not true! Absence of evidence is not *proof* of absence, but it certainly is *evidence*. Why do we think magnetic monopoles (or unicorns, for that matter) don't exist? Because we've looked and haven't found any. – John D. Cook Aug 17 '10 at 18:15
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Besides, Tzippy is misquoting Sagan, since Sagan never believed that. He in fact listed it among the [fallacies in his baloney detecion kit](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#The_Demon-Haunted_World:_Science_as_a_Candle_in_the_Dark_.281995.29). – Raskolnikov Dec 03 '10 at 23:31
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@JohnD.Cook, +1. However, your comment relies on the fact that we *have* looked, and that there was a reasonable chance of having found evidence if it really were there; consider, for example, the various 'missing links' that were ultimately found (and those that have not yet been). – gung - Reinstate Monica Feb 06 '12 at 18:32
Does Sagan qualify as a statistician? – Glen_b Nov 03 '12 at 07:00
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Wikipedia appears to [credit Martin Rees](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence#Overview)... who's also not a statistician. – Glen_b May 24 '13 at 02:12
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@Glen_b It appears that Sagan might have said that in some sense of irony, if it all, being a critic of Martin's quote. That's something to contemplate, for me, since cosmology is so full of examples where predictions have been made to account for inexplicable sources of error that have turned out to be correct (or not quite debunked), e.g. cosmic background radiation, dark matter, and the Big Bang Theory. – AdamO Jan 13 '14 at 17:21
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@John D. Cook "Because we've looked and haven't found any" makes sense to me, and I strongly agree with this rationale, but where do we fit the black swan like phenomena? – Robson Dec 11 '15 at 13:13
What is sometimes lost on some is that apparent absence really is evidence of absence. – DifferentialPleiometry Jan 21 '22 at 18:47

score 63 · Answer 21 · edited Mar 06 '15 at 04:35

63

"It's easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them."

-- Frederick Mosteller

edited Mar 06 '15 at 04:35

Richard Border

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John D. Cook

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score 57 · Answer 22 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:00

57

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.

-Bobby Bragan, 1963

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:00

shabbychef

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 07:38

Albort

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Wrong: 200 C and 0 C average to about 100 C, which is the boiling point of water. Ovens only go down to about 150 C, and 75 C is still too hot. Now, if you have one foot in scalding water (about 55 C) and another in cold icy water... then you are probably a strange person. – alexfernandez Aug 04 '14 at 15:23
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@alexfernandez My oven begins at 50°C. It is a standard oven, and all ovens in the flats that I lived in began at this temperature. – Jun 05 '16 at 09:40
@what I suppose that low-temperature cooking has brought down minimum temperatures, but I doubt that in 1963 this was the case. – alexfernandez Jun 05 '16 at 21:35
There's a similar Russian idiom that I'd translate as "The average patient temperature in the hospital is normal". – Eduard Gelman Jun 07 '18 at 18:40
"You cannot wade through a river which is on average 4 feet deep" - Nassim Taleb – dain Jan 11 '19 at 14:52

score 55 · Answer 23 · edited Jun 04 '17 at 19:01

Tout le monde y croit cependant, me disait un jour M. Lippmann, car les expérimentateurs s'imaginent que c'est un théorème de mathématiques, et les mathématiciens que c'est un fait expérimental.

Henri Poincaré, Calcul des probabilités (2nd ed., 1912), p. 171.

In English:

Everybody believes in the exponential law of errors [i.e., the Normal distribution]: the experimenters, because they think it can be proved by mathematics; and the mathematicians, because they believe it has been established by observation.

Whittaker, E. T. and Robinson, G. "Normal Frequency Distribution." Ch. 8 in The Calculus of Observations: A Treatise on Numerical Mathematics, 4th ed. New York: Dover, pp. 164-208, 1967. p. 179.

Quoted at Mathworld.com.

This is a rather free translation of a saying attributed to Gabriel Lippmann by Henri Poincar\'e in his Calcul des probabilit\'es (1896/1912). Original was in French, naturellement. Lippmann won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908. — Nick Cox, Apr 29 '13 at 22:30

Jeromy Anglim · Answer 24 · 2013-02-25T00:40:34.507

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I don't know about famous, but the following is one of my favourites:

Conducting data analysis is like drinking a fine wine. It is important to swirl and sniff the wine, to unpack the complex bouquet and to appreciate the experience. Gulping the wine doesn’t work.

-Daniel B. Wright (2003), see PDF of Article.

Reference: Wright, D. B. (2003). Making friends with your data: Improving how statistics are conducted and reported1. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 73(1), 123-136.

edited Feb 25 '13 at 00:40

answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:44

Jeromy Anglim

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Like it, though it does remind me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Toni – onestop Sep 07 '10 at 07:18

score 52 · Answer 25 · answered Aug 09 '10 at 15:36

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 Elwood Shannon

Henrik · Answer 26 · 2016-01-17T16:25:44.417

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... surely, God loves the .06 nearly as much as the .05. Can there be any doubt that God views the strength of evidence for or against the null as a fairly continuous function of the magnitude of p? (p.1277)

Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R. (1989). Statistical procedures and the justification of knowledge in psychological science. American Psychologist, 44(10), 1276-1284. pdf

edited Jan 17 '16 at 16:25

answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:03

Henrik

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I would love to take this one as my accepted answer ! too good to be true ! – robin girard Jul 27 '10 at 17:10
Anyway, I can give a citation of Lehman about that: "There is some convenience in such standardization since it permits a reduction in certain tables needed for carrying out various tests". – robin girard Aug 30 '10 at 12:37
Rosnow & Rosenthal's is a very useful, eye-opening quote that is *almost* correct. – rolando2 Mar 17 '11 at 12:15
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@rolando2: please expand. What's not correct about it? – naught101 Aug 21 '13 at 02:34
@naught101 - At this point I can't think of anything :-) – rolando2 Aug 21 '13 at 16:32
I'm not sure I got this one. Probably I didn't get it... – An old man in the sea. Aug 26 '14 at 18:13

score 47 · Answer 27 · answered Nov 08 '10 at 16:06

47

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage

answered Nov 08 '10 at 16:06

Frank Zafka

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+1 A breathtaking harbinger of the follies of the coming century; "GIGO before its time." – whuber Nov 09 '10 at 15:17
This makes me think of one of the most fundamental mathematical equations: $\text{crap}=\text{crap}$ – probabilityislogic May 28 '11 at 13:37
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Are you kidding? Isn't this what economics is all about? – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 06:39
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if I type "stick axchange crss vlidated" into Google, it brings me here! – Neil McGuigan Jan 23 '13 at 09:13
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I've had occasion to use Babbage's wonderful second sentence in a wider range of situations than this. – Glen_b Feb 25 '13 at 00:45
Agreed, but Babbage surely knew about iterative procedures that improve on an initial guess and converge to the right answer. – Nick Cox Jan 16 '18 at 18:01
I've never heard this one before, but it has jumped to my top 2 or 3 immediately. – Jared Becksfort Jan 20 '22 at 17:54

score 46 · Answer 28 · edited Jul 27 '10 at 06:42

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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.

Tukey (again but this one is my favorite)

edited Jul 27 '10 at 06:42

Rob Hyndman

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robin girard

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It has actually led to very interesting articles... :) – Tal Galili Jul 31 '10 at 01:07
@Tal: Fully agree! I think the whole area on optimal separation in minimax testing is starting from this idea ... and it is still so confused for a lot of statistician. For those interested see the paper of donoho http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aos/1085408492 (and the references in the paper ! since things are much older than donoho's paper) – robin girard Jul 31 '10 at 06:19

score 42 · Answer 29 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:01

42

Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.

-- Winston Churchill

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:01

shabbychef

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answered Aug 16 '10 at 05:45

ymihere

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This quote seems to be known only in Germany and there is doubt that it is authentic, see the link below where the State Office of Statistics in Baden-Württemberg show results of their research about this quote (sorry its only available in German). The Times, e.g., said that they never heard about it. http://www.statistik.baden-wuerttemberg.de/Veroeffentl/Monatshefte/essay.asp?xYear=2004&xMonth=11&eNr=11 – psj Nov 07 '10 at 10:58
5

The alternative form is "I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself" sometimes claimed to have been put into Churchill's mouth by Goebbels during a propaganda dispute over wartime losses. – Henry Nov 23 '11 at 22:40
I admit that I did not investigate about the quote's origin. However, the core of the statement remains true. Statistics, especially in mass media, are never presented with the necessary information to estimate their validity or correctness. – ymihere Jan 17 '12 at 09:45
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Does Churchill qualify as a statistician? – Glen_b Nov 03 '12 at 07:01
3

@Glen_b If he ever faked some data, then sure! – Darren Cook Feb 01 '13 at 13:27
This is almost too good to be false... Surely if it were intended sincerely, that'd be the most transparent propaganda ever? I guess war might make any kind of stupidity more believable, as long as it's the other side's stupidity. – naught101 Aug 21 '13 at 02:33

score 42 · Answer 30 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 15:05

42

The subjectivist (i.e. Bayesian) 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

answered Jul 27 '10 at 15:05

ramhiser

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oh the bayesian is soooo Good... – robin girard Jul 27 '10 at 15:39
I love this one. It is great ! – mlwida Dec 06 '10 at 09:00
Why are Bayesian always equated with subjectivist? -- What about E.T.Jaynes and the other 'objective Bayesians'? What about all subjectivity within the 'objectivist' frequentism? – gwr Dec 05 '15 at 16:04
2

@gwr Well 'objectivity' is a social construct that is subjectively evaluated as an experience, so calling Bayesians out on subjectivity is less meritless because untrue, and more meritless because more or less everyone is subjectivist. ;) – Alexis Feb 11 '18 at 16:52

score 37 · Answer 31 · edited Nov 03 '12 at 06:15

37

"Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten."

-Terry Pratchett

edited Nov 03 '12 at 06:15

naught101

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answered Jul 31 '10 at 05:49

Jeromy Anglim

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score 35 · Answer 32 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:03

35

Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.

-- Brad Efron

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:03

shabbychef

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answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:11

Roland Kofler

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Do you think that by "those" he means "everyone" ? what was the context of this citation ? it seems a bit strong like this :) – robin girard Aug 30 '10 at 12:42
8

I would go one step further, within statistics. Those who ignore Bayesian statistics are condemned to reinvent it. – probabilityislogic Jan 30 '11 at 11:08
If anybody is looking for a source of this statement, it's attributed to Efron in this article (without source there though): https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-5823.2001.tb00474.x – Phil Jan 02 '20 at 11:35

score 35 · Answer 33 · answered Aug 08 '10 at 04:15

35

This is unlikely to be a popular quote, but anyway,

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

answered Aug 08 '10 at 04:15

Robby McKilliam

2,010
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I think it is really popular.... but not it statistic (we don't want to loose our job because physisics are improving their experiment :) ). Anyway I think Rutherford belongs to this class of spiritual scientist... +1 – robin girard Aug 09 '10 at 12:32
All physical experiments I have ever seen have a standard deviation attached to it in some form (most commonly a +/- range). So he must have been joking. – KalEl Aug 19 '10 at 10:25
Unfortunately it is popular among those that don't understand or trust statistics. Once had it quoted to me when I gave a scientist an estimate of the number of hours it would take me to design and analyze his experiment. He didn't seem to appreciate the fact that noise can look like effects, and effects of interest can be hidden from intuition by noise. – Kingsford Jones Sep 11 '10 at 17:05
7

I think this quote means that the results of the experiment should be "obvious", and statistics just lets one put a precise figure as to "just how obvious". The word *needs* is the key. – probabilityislogic Jan 30 '11 at 10:56
2

I thought this was the tagline for Mythbusters... – JMS May 27 '11 at 20:31
2

I really like this quote, for me it is clear that it is not a joke (@KalEl). This recalls that most often it is not the data that talks but the experiment, standard deviations are here to confirm that your experiment is talking loud. – robin girard Sep 20 '11 at 07:07
@KalEl: [you need statistics](http://www.stat.yale.edu/Courses/1997-98/101/boxplot.gif); [you don't need statistics](http://www.lohninger.com/comimg/boxplot.gif). – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 06:07
1

It really says experimental design is the most important branch of statistics to experimental science. – Clark Feb 13 '19 at 00:12

score 35 · Answer 34 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:20

35

Figures don't lie, but liars do figure

--Mark Twain

answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:20

jilles de wit

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I don't get what is so deep in that one, is it only playing with words ? – robin girard Aug 03 '10 at 19:29
I like to think of it as the statisticians equivalent of "guns don't kill people, people kill people" not very deep, but important to realise from time to time – jilles de wit Aug 04 '10 at 09:17
So it's an inane platitude used for quibbling over semantics? "Cigarettes don't cause cancer; people cause cancer." "Landmines don't maim people; people maim people." – Lèse majesté Aug 05 '10 at 00:36
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well... there is a fine line between inane platitude and profound wisdom. I like the quote for it's poetic quality. Any insight is of secondary importance to me. – jilles de wit Aug 05 '10 at 07:25
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Does Twain qualify as a statistician? – Glen_b Nov 03 '12 at 07:00

score 34 · Answer 35 · answered Mar 17 '11 at 10:53

34

The plural of anecdote is not data.

-- Roger Brinner

(in the context of Anecdotal_evidence)

answered Mar 17 '11 at 10:53

mlwida

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Surely it *is*, as long as the anecdotes aren't sampled with bias? – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 06:38
1

@naught101 Please provide an example? – Jase Nov 21 '12 at 10:15
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@Jase: an anecdote is a chunk of information that is true, but may not be representative of the truth (i.e. it's biased toward the point that the story teller is trying to make). But that doesn't say anything about multiple anecdotes. If you could show that the biases in each anecdote in a set were independent, then they would probably cancel to some extent, allowing reliable analysis. Of course, this is a stupidly inefficient way of collecting data, and because it would be so difficult, there are no examples, because no-one has ever done it. And I was mostly just being a smart arse :D – naught101 Nov 21 '12 at 10:23
3

I would think that anecdotes are fundamentally biased: They caught the attention of someone, and caused emotions that made him remember it. There is no way human attention can be statistically independent, I assume. – Volker Siegel Sep 03 '15 at 16:09

score 32 · Answer 36 · answered Sep 11 '10 at 15:18

…the statistician knows…that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world.

George Box (JASA, 1976, Vol. 71, 791-799)

score 31 · Answer 37 · answered May 27 '11 at 08:11

31

"The first time I was in a statistics course, I was there to teach it"

John Tukey (link)

answered May 27 '11 at 08:11

Neil McGuigan

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He's not the only one--and that's not necessarily a good thing. – whuber May 18 '12 at 17:00
9

Haha, true. Tukey gets a pass though! – Neil McGuigan May 18 '12 at 17:57

score 30 · Answer 38 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 01:20

30

"It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without statistics." - Andrejs Dunkels

answered Aug 06 '10 at 01:20

Thylacoleo

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The best antidote to "...lies, damned lies, and statistics." – Thylacoleo Aug 18 '10 at 10:44
depending on what you call 'the thruth'... I don't think I give so much value to statistical truth :) – robin girard Aug 30 '10 at 12:39
I think it's a great one (I think it goes well with - "no models are true, some are useful") – Tal Galili Oct 20 '10 at 02:27

score 30 · Answer 39 · edited Dec 05 '15 at 15:54

30

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

-- Kurt Tucholsky, in: Französischer Witz, 1925

edited Dec 05 '15 at 15:54

gwr

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:14

pramodc84

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According to Wikiquote it is misattributed to Joseph Stalin; the origin is Kurt Tucholsky: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Misattributed – Peter Mortensen Aug 07 '10 at 00:36
Here is the (so far much more likely) source: [Französischer Witz](http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Tucholsky,+Kurt/Werke/1925/Franz%C3%B6sischer+Witz) by Kurt Tucholsky dating back to 1925: »Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!« (German original) – gwr Dec 05 '15 at 15:56

score 29 · Answer 40 · answered Aug 09 '11 at 12:43

29

"To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.”

Box, Hunter, and Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters (1978).

answered Aug 09 '11 at 12:43

user603

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Tell that to the theoretical physics community... – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 06:41

score 26 · Answer 41 · edited Aug 15 '11 at 05:59

26

I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I'm not kidding.

Hal Varian

edited Aug 15 '11 at 05:59

Emre

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answered Jul 29 '10 at 10:50

Graham Cookson

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I guess Val Harian is not a statistician if he is not kidding... what is a sexy job ? for me it is like the sitation with the sword of the century... fun but a bit trivial :) – robin girard Aug 12 '10 at 07:58
2

This needs to be corrected. It was Hal Varian that said it. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html – vqv Dec 20 '10 at 04:23
4

in what year did he write this? – Leo Schalkwyk Mar 29 '12 at 09:43
3

@Leo: He didn't write it; he said it (at the link provided by vqv). It was only a couple of years ago, so, you still have time. ;-) – cardinal Mar 29 '12 at 11:57

score 25 · Answer 42 · answered Sep 11 '10 at 13:50

25

We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

Rutherford D. Roger

answered Sep 11 '10 at 13:50

Andre Holzner

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score 24 · Answer 43 · answered Nov 04 '11 at 13:18

24

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

-- John Tukey

answered Nov 04 '11 at 13:18

chl

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score 24 · Answer 44 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:02

24

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

-– Sir Ronald A. Fisher

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:02

shabbychef

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:10

Dave Kellen

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I cannot believe this does not have ten times the upvotes! As an epidemiologist with a good (as far as people tell me...) grasp of statistics, I believe that's my most important "asset": understanding _both_ the epidemiological question and the statistical technique, and matching those correctly to each other... – Theodore Lytras Feb 13 '20 at 11:02

score 22 · Answer 45 · answered Sep 01 '11 at 05:04

22

60% of the time, it works every time.

-Brian Fantana

answered Sep 01 '11 at 05:04

Alex

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for the uninitiated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLq2-uZd5LY – Neil McGuigan Jan 23 '13 at 09:18

score 22 · Answer 46 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:16

22

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

-- probably: Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911).

answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:16

jilles de wit

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I hate this quote. It makes professions using statistics look like you could cheat. But, when someone profoundly uses statistics one knows that actually you cannot cheat. Because when provided with enough information about the statistical procedures used, one can draw a conclusion on the soundness of the procedures/results. If not enough information on the statistical (and other) procedures are provided, you should immediately question the results. – Henrik Jul 27 '10 at 16:15
5

That would be true if everyone were knowledgeable enough in statistics to drive the correct conclusions. Alas, that quote is very applicable to many of those amusing human beings called politicians... – nico Jul 29 '10 at 11:22
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Whoever said this had no basic understanding of Statistics, or he was joking. – KalEl Aug 19 '10 at 10:21
10

I think this quote is more of a cynical but realistic view of how statistical data is mostly used in debates (i.e. selected to support a preconceived notion rather than produced to test a hypothesis) – jilles de wit Sep 07 '10 at 09:12
6

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and fake statistics. – Joris Meys Sep 13 '10 at 22:01
1

@JorisMeys: Or real, accurate, and precise statistics taken out of context... – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 06:03

score 21 · Answer 47 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:44

21

"The Central Limit Theorem is about the journey and the Strong Law of Large Numbers is about the destination." stats.SE user cardinal in a comment on this question

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:44

Community

1

answered Feb 03 '13 at 14:44

Dilip Sarwate

41,202
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score 21 · Answer 48 · edited Mar 06 '15 at 17:28

21

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.

xkcd

edited Mar 06 '15 at 17:28

krlmlr

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answered Jun 27 '13 at 19:58

sk8asd123

281
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score 19 · Answer 49 · answered Aug 02 '10 at 08:58

19

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.

Arthur Conan Doyle

answered Aug 02 '10 at 08:58

Random

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Clearly this person doesn't quite grasp the power of combinatorial calculations. Normal distributions appear because they are easy to realise. – probabilityislogic May 22 '15 at 00:31

score 19 · Answer 50 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:15

19

My thesis is simply this: probability does not exist. - Bruno de Finetti

answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:15

Roland Kofler

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score 19 · Answer 51 · edited Mar 06 '15 at 17:02

19

This one is brand new, and Allen Wilcox is an epidemiologist, not a statistician, but whatever, I'm running with it.

Data do not speak for themselves - they need context, and they need skeptical evaluation

edited Mar 06 '15 at 17:02

krlmlr

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answered Sep 01 '11 at 03:05

Fomite

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I am upvoting this because a minor variation is so apt for our site: "Your data/output/code/formula do not speak for themselves: they need context and they need sceptical evaluation." – whuber Aug 04 '15 at 14:48

Neil McGuigan · Answer 52 · 2010-12-05T05:32:57.497

19

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 (okay, so he's not a statistician)

edited Dec 05 '10 at 05:32

answered Aug 22 '10 at 00:34

Neil McGuigan

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Google finds 12.3 million hits for this quotation. After running down the first eight pages of them, I haven't found a single site that actually gives a source--they all seem to be quoting each other rather than Mr. Twain. Does anyone know where he wrote this? Or maybe it's apocryphal. – whuber Nov 08 '10 at 14:05
2

Heh, it was also used in the beginning of "The Big Short": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/ ( http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/deep-focus-the-big-short/ ) – Konstantinos Jan 17 '16 at 21:07
I am almost sure that this is from "Huckleberry Finn." Ain't it? – Ulisses Braga-Neto Oct 02 '16 at 01:25
Late to the party here, but see this link: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/ – Phil Jan 02 '20 at 11:32

score 18 · Answer 53 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 05:15

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence."

Often attributed to Carl Sagan, but he was paraphrasing sceptic Marcello Truzzi. Doubtless the concept is even more ancient.

David Hume said, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence".

One could argue this is not a quote about statistics. However, applied statistics is ultimately in the business of evaluating the quality of evidence for or against some proposition.

score 18 · Answer 54 · answered Mar 22 '16 at 20:05

18

Without data you're just another person with an opinion. -- W. Edwards Deming

answered Mar 22 '16 at 20:05

Vishal

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Is there a source available for this quote? I've seen it being quoted on the net, but I have not found a source for where Deming would have said or written this. – Phil Mar 05 '20 at 11:00

score 18 · Answer 55 · answered Feb 06 '12 at 19:18

18

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

-Albert Einstein

I acknowledge that Einstein wasn't a statistician. However, Michael Friendly uses this quote in arguing for a greater role for visualizations in data analysis. I share that goal, and I think the quote works nicely.

answered Feb 06 '12 at 19:18

gung - Reinstate Monica

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+1 That's a nice one. The funny thing is this, sometimes people can picture it (make or see a plot of something) and still not understand it. :) – Graeme Walsh Jul 04 '13 at 00:44

score 18 · Answer 56 · answered Dec 21 '10 at 15:48

18

The primary product of a research inquiry is one or more measures of effect size, not p values.

Cohen, J. (1990). Things I have learned (so far). American Psychologist, 45, 1304-1312.

answered Dec 21 '10 at 15:48

chl

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score 18 · Answer 57 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:04

18

An ecologist is a statistician who likes to be outside.

-- apparently a good friend of Murray Cooper.

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:04

shabbychef

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answered Jul 29 '10 at 11:25

Roman Luštrik

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score 17 · Answer 58 · answered May 27 '11 at 18:19

17

The Earth is round. p < .05

Jacob Cohen

answered May 27 '11 at 18:19

Peter Flom

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The earth is an oblate spheroid. So I guess that depends on what degree of accuracy you care about.. – naught101 Feb 07 '12 at 02:24

score 17 · Answer 59 · answered May 27 '11 at 18:21

17

When I see articles with lots of significance tests, I say that the statisticians are p-ing on the research.

Herman Friedmann (by recollection, he said this in class)

answered May 27 '11 at 18:21

Peter Flom

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Who's Hermann Friedmann? I've tried searching for him, but couldn't find anything... – An old man in the sea. Nov 29 '16 at 22:48

score 17 · Answer 60 · answered Sep 11 '10 at 10:29

May I add this one, because I like Jan's contributions to psychometrics and statistics...

Causal interpretation of the results of regression analysis of observational data is a risky business. The responsibility rests entirely on the shoulders of the researcher, because the shoulders of the statistical technique cannot carry such strong inferences.

Jan de Leeuw, homepage

score 16 · Answer 61 · answered Jul 26 '12 at 15:51

Found in Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation by Peter Norvig

Most of the time, when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you have screwed up the experiment

(Michael Wigler)

in the sense of

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

(Carl Sagan)

which is based on a similar quote by Pierre Laplace

score 15 · Answer 62 · edited Feb 11 '18 at 15:59

15

This is my favourite:

"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”

by Ashleigh Brilliant

edited Feb 11 '18 at 15:59

Jaap

846
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answered Sep 11 '14 at 13:38

user55609

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score 15 · Answer 63 · answered Jul 22 '12 at 19:19

15

Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

--Tukey

answered Jul 22 '12 at 19:19

user603

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This quote is great because it highlights the importance of graphical summary compared to only using numerical summary. – Nuclear03020704 Aug 10 '20 at 04:20

score 15 · Answer 64 · answered Dec 08 '10 at 15:13

15

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. ~Gregg Easterbrook

answered Dec 08 '10 at 15:13

matcheek

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This is practically identical to http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes/2044#2044 but has been attributed to a different person! Who's right? – whuber Dec 21 '10 at 18:49
3

Google searches suggest, by 20 to 1, that Easterbrook originated this quotation, but he didn't really start writing until after Coase was quoted in print. The best evidence I can find concerning this (and it's still not very good) is Coase's Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase . – whuber Dec 21 '10 at 18:58

score 15 · Answer 65 · answered Mar 26 '13 at 18:32

15

"...a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data."

E.T. Jaynes

answered Mar 26 '13 at 18:32

D L Dahly

3,663
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score 15 · Answer 66 · answered Jan 06 '11 at 14:22

15

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

-- Von Neumann

answered Jan 06 '11 at 14:22

chl

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Talk to the hand, cause the [quasi-random sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasirandom) ain't listening. – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:35

score 15 · Answer 67 · edited Aug 15 '11 at 04:14

I just can't help myself, this is a provocative quote from E. T. Jaynes:

Many of us have already explored the road you are following, and we know what you will find at the end of it. It doesn't matter how many new words you drag into the discussion to avoid having to utter the word 'probability' in a sense different from frequency: likelihood, confidence, significance, propensity, support, credibility, acceptability, indifference, consonance, tenability; and so on, until the resources of the good Dr Roget are exhausted. All of these are attempts to represent degrees of plausibility by real numbers, and they are covered automatically by Cox's theorems. It doesn't matter which approach you happen to like philosophically; by the time you have made your methods fully consistent, you will be forced, kicking and screaming, back to the ones given by Laplace. Until you have achieved mathematical equivalence with Laplace's methods, it will be possible, by looking in specific problems with Galileo's magnification, to exhibit the defects in your methods.

score 15 · Answer 68 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:18

15

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

George Bernard Shaw

answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:18

is it ? then we are all intelligent persons here:) – robin girard Jul 27 '10 at 16:22
See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/20/moved-by-stats/ – Phil Jan 02 '20 at 11:44

David LeBauer · Answer 69 · 2012-03-28T23:07:00.480

14

preamble: There is even a class of user now days who sees the signiﬁcance stars rather like the gold stars my grandson sometimes gets on his homework:

Three solid gold (significance) stars on the main effects will do very nicely, thank you, and if there are a few little stars here and there on the interactions, so much the better!

W.N. Venables

Exegeses on Linear Models

edited Mar 28 '12 at 23:07

answered Jun 01 '11 at 17:43

David LeBauer

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Surely that's highly context-dependent? – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:39
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@naught it is sarcastic – David LeBauer Mar 28 '12 at 14:42
Heh. Fair enough. That probably also needs more context :P – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 23:04
@naught101 done. – David LeBauer Mar 28 '12 at 23:07

score 14 · Answer 70 · answered Nov 08 '10 at 15:05

14

It would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable

~ Spock, "The Enterprise Incident",stardata 5027.3

answered Nov 08 '10 at 15:05

mlwida

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I appreciate that the citation comes with the stardate. – gung - Reinstate Monica Jul 29 '14 at 22:12

score 14 · Answer 71 · answered Apr 27 '13 at 15:58

14

"Taking a model too seriously is really just another way of not taking it seriously at all."

By Andrew Gelman

answered Apr 27 '13 at 15:58

ArturoSaCo

101
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score 13 · Answer 72 · answered Jul 17 '14 at 12:15

13

"Statistics is exciting because you get to play with others' data while telling them their research is crap."

Stephen J. Senn (Source)

answered Jul 17 '14 at 12:15

Momo

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score 13 · Answer 73 · answered Apr 24 '12 at 03:43

13

Everybody is a Bayesian. It's just that some know it, and some don't. - Trivellore Raghunathan

answered Apr 24 '12 at 03:43

Pavo

1
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score 13 · Answer 74 · answered May 18 '12 at 16:56

Don't think -- use the computer.

Attributed ("tongue in cheek," just to make sure we understand the intent) to "G. Dyke." Quoted in Phillip I. Good and James W. Hardin, Common Errors in Statistics: see the very first page of Part I.

A "G. Dyke" is cited in the bibliography as the author of How to avoid bad statistics. Field Crops Res. 1997; 51: 165-197. This apparently is George Dyke, who later in the book is quoted more at length:

The availability of 'user-friendly' statistical software has caused authors to become increasingly careless about the logic of interpreting their results, and to rely uncritically on computer output, often using the 'default option' when something a little different (usually, but not always, a little more complicated) is correct, or at least more appropriate.

[Cited on pp 71-72 in the first edition, 2003.]

A related quotation graces the beginning of Chapter 7:

Cut out the appropriate part of the computer output and paste it onto the draft of the paper.

+1 These are very good. Thanks for sharing the references too. Will definitely look them up. Very useful! — Graeme Walsh, Jul 04 '13 at 00:34

score 12 · Answer 75 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 00:29

"If you think that statistics has nothing to say about what you do or how you could do it better, then you are either wrong or in need of a more interesting job." - Stephen Senn (Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health, Cambridge University Press, 2003)

score 12 · Answer 76 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:05

12

In the long run, we're all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes.

A reference to survival analysis?!

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:05

shabbychef

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answered Aug 06 '10 at 01:43

Thylacoleo

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Isn't this an "economist" joke? Saying that the economist Jargon of "the long run" we never actually get to "the long run" – probabilityislogic Jan 19 '11 at 03:39

score 12 · Answer 77 · answered Mar 28 '12 at 23:53

12

With three constants, I can fit a dog. With four, I can make it bark.

Attributed to William Reifsnyder, in a personal communication to me. Unfortunately I can't find a reference on the 'web.

answered Mar 28 '12 at 23:53

naught101

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17

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk" is a quote by von Neumann. – mark999 Nov 03 '12 at 07:43

chl · Answer 78 · 2010-09-11T21:12:24.913

12

At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning.

Edward Tufte, www.edwardtufte.com

edited Sep 11 '10 at 21:12

answered Sep 11 '10 at 10:26

chl

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Edward Tufte is a statistician. Started his career with BA and MS in statistics from Stanford, taught and wrote books about statistics for political scientists and is a fellow of the ASA. – Kingsford Jones Sep 11 '10 at 15:13
@Kingsford My fault! I was initially thinking of another citation, not from Tufte and didn't remove my first words... I UPDATED my response. Many thanks! – chl Sep 11 '10 at 21:11

score 12 · Answer 79 · answered Nov 08 '10 at 14:12

"After 17 years of interacting with physicians, I have come to realize that many of them are adherents of a religion they call Statistics... Like any good religion, it involves vague mysteries capable of contradictory and irrational interpretation. It has a priesthood and a class of mendicant friars. And it provides Salvation: Proper invocation of the religious dogmas of Statistics will result in publication in prestigious journals."

David S. Salsburg (author of The Lady Tasting Tea), quoted at "Pithypedia".

score 12 · Answer 80 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 17:57

12

Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.

answered Jul 27 '10 at 17:57

Baltimark

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aligatou gozaimasu – robin girard Jul 28 '10 at 09:35
I would say data is the bullet, Statistics is the gun. – KalEl Aug 19 '10 at 10:23

score 11 · Answer 81 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:04

11

The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.

-- James Clerk Maxwell

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:04

shabbychef

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answered Aug 01 '10 at 14:21

Darren Wilkinson

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score 11 · Answer 82 · edited Aug 19 '15 at 15:43

11

All information looks like noise until you break the code.

Hiro in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)

edited Aug 19 '15 at 15:43

Dirk

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answered Aug 04 '10 at 18:29

Seth

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(+1) It's an interesting quotation, not least for being so obviously incorrect. – whuber Aug 19 '15 at 15:58

score 11 · Answer 83 · edited Feb 11 '18 at 16:09

11

"New methods always look better than old ones. Neural nets are better than logistic regression, support vector machines are better than neural nets, etc." - Brad Efron

edited Feb 11 '18 at 16:09

Jaap

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answered Aug 06 '10 at 01:29

Thylacoleo

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shame they often only look better... :-( – Dikran Marsupial Aug 17 '10 at 12:05
Yeah, the first part of that quote is saying a different thing to the second part ("look" vs. "are"). – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:38
They also bring in new clients, which then has to be converted to the good old methods ... – kjetil b halvorsen Mar 22 '18 at 08:24

Johannes · Answer 84 · 2011-08-06T18:31:23.263

11

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

Not quite from a statistician, but I nonetheless like to quote this one in lectures. It nicely sums up what we as data analysts do.

edited Aug 06 '11 at 18:31

answered Aug 06 '11 at 17:52

Johannes

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score 11 · Answer 85 · answered Mar 28 '12 at 23:57

11

"What the use of a p-value 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 (Theory of Probability)

answered Mar 28 '12 at 23:57

Zen

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I don't get it: how can a result be both "observable" and "not occurred"? – nalzok Jul 11 '20 at 15:47

score 11 · Answer 86 · answered Sep 10 '10 at 23:05

11

There is no free hunch.

-- Robert Abelson

answered Sep 10 '10 at 23:05

Carlos Accioly

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there is if you are below your "production frontier"... ;P – probabilityislogic Jul 17 '19 at 11:02

score 11 · Answer 87 · answered Jun 25 '12 at 00:08

11

The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.

by R.A. Fisher

answered Jun 25 '12 at 00:08

AnastD

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score 11 · Answer 88 · answered Nov 20 '12 at 17:15

11

Statistics is the grammar of science - Karl Pearson

answered Nov 20 '12 at 17:15

StatisticsDoc Consulting

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I would love a source for this quote. I know he wrote a book called "The Grammar of Science" and that he was a statistician, but that does not mean that "Statistics is the grammar of science" is a quote by him. – Phil Mar 05 '20 at 11:06

Graeme Walsh · Answer 89 · 2013-06-28T02:16:59.910

11

“There are two things you are better off not watching in the making: sausages and econometric estimates.” - Edward Leamer

The quote comes from:

Leamer, Edward E, 1983. "Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(1), pages 31-43, March.

And he also says it, in spoken word, on this EconTalk podcast hosted by Russ Roberts.

edited Jun 28 '13 at 02:16

answered Jun 27 '13 at 23:53

Graeme Walsh

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at least with a sausage, I know that I like the finished product.... – probabilityislogic Jul 17 '19 at 11:01
@probabilityislogic haha Very good! – Graeme Walsh Jul 17 '19 at 11:43

score 11 · Answer 90 · answered Jun 30 '13 at 03:09

11

"When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math. If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics." - Karl Broman

answered Jun 30 '13 at 03:09

Glen

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This isn't a quote about statistics. It's a quote about linguistic pedantry. – naught101 Feb 07 '14 at 04:29
3

Hmmmmmm, linguistic pedantry? Sure... But still about statistics. – Glen Feb 07 '14 at 05:07

score 11 · Answer 91 · answered Jan 18 '11 at 22:11

11

One sees, from this Essay, that the theory of probabilities is basically just common sense reduced to calculus; it makes one appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it.

Another one from Laplace

answered Jan 18 '11 at 22:11

probabilityislogic

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Laplace never took measure theory from a statistics professor ;) – JMS May 27 '11 at 20:34
@JMS - measure theory not as good as complex analysis perhaps? Laplace was quite good at this I think. Perhaps statistics from analysis perspective has more "common sense" about it than measure theory ;). – probabilityislogic May 28 '11 at 11:52
calculus: if I recall correctly, the French original is "calcul", more accurately translated as "calculation" – Nick Cox Nov 17 '14 at 00:43

score 10 · Answer 92 · edited Aug 15 '11 at 04:13

A bit obscure this one, but a great quote about subjective probability:

... There is no way, however, in which the individual can avoid the burden of responsibility for his own evaluations. The key cannot be found that will unlock the enchanted garden wherein, among the fairy-rings and the shrubs of magic wands, beneath the trees laden with monads and noumena, blossom forth the flowers of probabilitas realis. With these fabulous blooms safely in our button-holes we would be spared the necessity of forming opinions, and the heavy loads we bear upon our necks would be rendered superflous once and for all.

Bruno de Finetti, Theory of Probability, Vol 2

score 10 · Answer 93 · edited Jun 11 '20 at 14:32

A man who ‘rejects’ a hypothesis provisionally, as a matter of habitual practice, when the significance is at the 1% level or higher, will certainly be mistaken in not more than 1% of such decisions. For when the hypothesis is correct he will be mistaken in just 1% of these cases, and when it is incorrect he will never be mistaken in rejection. [...] However, the calculation is absurdly academic, for in fact no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects hypotheses; he rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his evidence and his ideas.

-- Sir Ronald A. Fisher, from Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference (1956)

Another quote as a commentary: "This passage clearly is intended as a criticism of Neyman and Pearson, although again their names are not mentioned. However, these authors never recommended a fixed level of significance that would be used in all cases. [...] Thus Fisher rather incongruously appears to be attacking his own past position rather than that of Neyman and Pearson" (from Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics by Erich Lehmann, section 4.5).

score 10 · Answer 94 · answered Dec 05 '15 at 19:14

10

"A frequentist is a person whose long-run ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time."

Unknown.

answered Dec 05 '15 at 19:14

tho_mi

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Why does this frequentist exclusively look at null hypotheses? :) – Cliff AB Jun 01 '20 at 15:05
"A frequentist is a person whose..." that's an old fiction. There are no frequentists and Bayesians as if this is a characteristic of a person like a nationality or religion. Maybe you could still compare it to something like jobs, like somebody who paints is a painter and somebody who works with electricity is an electrician. However, I would like somebody who does statistics to be a statistician and not a Bayesian or frequentist. – Sextus Empiricus Jun 01 '20 at 16:12

score 10 · Answer 95 · answered Jan 28 '16 at 20:41

10

Bayesians address the question everyone is interested in by using assumptions no-one believes, while frequentists use impeccable logic to deal with an issue of no interest to anyone

Louis Lyons

answered Jan 28 '16 at 20:41

Ruggero Turra

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score 10 · Answer 96 · answered Aug 23 '10 at 14:14

10

'Figures fool when fools figure'.

Henry Oliver Lancaster

answered Aug 23 '10 at 14:14

score 10 · Answer 97 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:03

10

efficiency = statistical efficiency x usage.

-- John Tukey

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:03

shabbychef

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 08:43

John D. Cook

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score 10 · Answer 98 · edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:12

10

A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.

-- M.J. Moroney

edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:12

shabbychef

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:04

Alan Scrivner

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Thanks. Had the opportunity to work with a great statistician for a while and was always amazed by how much information he could get out of the least amount of data by asking very pointed questions. This quotation so reminds me of hm – Alan Scrivner Jul 29 '10 at 03:30
Nice quote, though I can't help imagine how it would sound being spoken by Chris Eubank... – onestop Nov 08 '10 at 08:57

score 9 · Answer 99 · answered Aug 05 '10 at 19:41

9

9 out of ten dentists think the 10th dentist is an idiot.

No idea who said it.

answered Aug 05 '10 at 19:41

Brandon Bertelsen

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Similar to 80% of car drivers think they're "above average". – probabilityislogic May 28 '11 at 13:42
"9 out of 10 persons like chocolate. 1 is lying." – cbeleites unhappy with SX Mar 19 '20 at 17:24

score 9 · Answer 100 · edited Mar 28 '12 at 23:55

9

The probability is like the stick used by the blind man to feel his way. If he could see, he would not need the cane, just as if we knew which horse runs faster, then we would not need probability theory.

Stanislaw Lem

edited Mar 28 '12 at 23:55

naught101

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answered Sep 01 '11 at 13:57

hsigrist

101
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Ho1 · Answer 101 · 2015-08-04T14:45:57.197

9

Uncertainty is a personal matter; it is not the uncertainty but your uncertainty. (Dennis Lindley)

Reference: Dennis Victor Lindley (2006), Understanding Uncertainty, Wiley-Interscience, p. 1.

edited Aug 04 '15 at 14:45

answered Aug 04 '15 at 14:38

Ho1

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The picture is of John Nelder, not Dennis Lindley. – Nick Cox Jan 28 '16 at 19:46
@NickCox You're right! Here's the origianl Lindley: http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/feature/5060491/The-key-is-to-teach-people-about-uncertainty_-An-interview-with-Dennis-V_-Lindle.html – Ho1 Jan 29 '16 at 14:27
To play on the usual joke about cosmologists, theologians, economists, etc., Lindley appears not to have acted on his own maxim. He was certain that almost other statisticians were wrong. – Nick Cox Jan 29 '16 at 14:33
@NickCox So, is _certainty_ also personal? :-) – Ho1 Jan 29 '16 at 16:23
I'm certain of it. – Nick Cox Jan 29 '16 at 16:29

score 9 · Answer 102 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:05

9

To understand God's Thoughts we must study statistics for these are the measure of His purpose.

--Florence Nightingale

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:05

shabbychef

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answered Aug 15 '10 at 18:36

Only problem is that god itself either eludes statistical reasoning or is statistically very unlikely to exist. – Momo May 26 '13 at 08:53

Xavier Labouze · Answer 103 · 2011-11-27T12:38:03.460

9

The roll of the dice will never abolish chance

Written in 1897 by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) , a famous French poet - In French :

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard

edited Nov 27 '11 at 12:38

answered Nov 23 '11 at 18:21

Xavier Labouze

233
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score 9 · Answer 104 · answered Sep 11 '10 at 15:27

9

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

George Box

answered Sep 11 '10 at 15:27

Kingsford Jones

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score 9 · Answer 105 · answered Jul 17 '12 at 12:44

Context: An F-test is often a poor way to justify pooling, because F-test is not robust against non-normality.

"To make a preliminary test on variances is rather like putting to sea in a rowing boat to find out whether conditions are sufficiently calm for an ocean liner to leave port." (G.E.P. Box, "Non-normality and tests on variances",

Source: Biometrika, 40 (1953), pp 318-335, quote on page 333; via from Moore & McCabe.

(props to Tim Hesterberg: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-February/154856.html)

score 9 · Answer 106 · answered Jan 30 '13 at 03:34

9

People think that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart. Bradley Efron

answered Jan 30 '13 at 03:34

rolando2

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score 9 · Answer 107 · answered Jan 28 '11 at 20:23

9

[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.

-- Sir Francis Galton

answered Jan 28 '11 at 20:23

Did

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score 9 · Answer 108 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:26

These days the statistician is often asked such questions as "Are you a Bayesian?" "Are you a frequentist?" "Are you a data analyst?" "Are you a designer of experiments?". I will argue that the appropriate answer to ALL of these questions can be (and preferably should be) "yes", and that we can see why this is so if we consider the scientific context for what statisticians do.

--G.E.P. Box

score 8 · Answer 109 · answered May 27 '11 at 15:30

8

"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may be cast." - Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

Found here.

answered May 27 '11 at 15:30

Tal Galili

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-1 not really stats specific... – naught101 Nov 03 '12 at 10:39

Macro · Answer 110 · 2012-06-20T00:53:26.190

8

A quote from Karl Pearson:

The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material

I think of statistics as, essentially, the methodology of science, so that's how I interpret this quote.

edited Jun 20 '12 at 00:53

answered Mar 16 '12 at 00:26

Macro

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score 8 · Answer 111 · answered Jan 29 '13 at 16:44

8

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." albert einstein

answered Jan 29 '13 at 16:44

arash

1
1
1

score 7 · Answer 112 · answered Aug 13 '10 at 16:11

7

"I cannot conceal the fact here that in the [application of probability theory], I foresee many things happening which can cause one to be badly mistaken if he does not proceed cautiously.",

Bernoulli (1713) (via ET Jaynes)

"A statistician is someone who knows what to assume to be Gaussian"

Dikran Marsupial (2009) (not famous yet ;o).

answered Aug 13 '10 at 16:11

Dikran Marsupial

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Do we vote for the first one or the second one :) ? – robin girard Aug 13 '10 at 16:35
first one, I'm not famous... yet ;o) BTW, the second one is intended as a complement, just in case there was any doubt. – Dikran Marsupial Aug 17 '10 at 11:50

Did · Answer 113 · 2011-01-28T19:29:25.247

7

Everybody knows that probability and statistics are the same thing, and statistics is nothing but correlation. Now the correlation is just the cosine of an angle, thus all is trivial.

-- Emil Artin, according to Kai Lai Chung in Elementary probability theory (right, Artin might not been known primarily as a statistician)

edited Jan 28 '11 at 19:29

answered Jan 28 '11 at 19:20

Did

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score 7 · Answer 114 · answered Mar 17 '11 at 12:05

The researcher armed with a confidence interval, but deprived of the false respectability of statistical significance, must work harder to convince himself and others of the importance of his findings. This can only be good.

Michael Oakes, Statistical inference: A commentary for the social and behavioural sciences (NY: Wiley, 1986)

score 7 · Answer 115 · answered Jul 29 '10 at 15:43

7

You may be too vague to be wrong and that's really bad cause that's just obscuring the issue.

Bruce Sterling

answered Jul 29 '10 at 15:43

Christian

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2

Also a favorite topic of Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. "That's not even wrong." – rolando2 May 28 '11 at 13:21
"Not even wrong" is often mentioned as a standard put-down of the acerbic (but very smart) physicist Wolfgang Pauli. – Nick Cox Jan 16 '18 at 18:07

score 6 · Answer 116 · answered Aug 04 '14 at 15:10

6

"If you put a buttock on a hot plate and another one on an ice cube, the average is good, but in reality your bottom is in trouble."

Grigore Moisil

answered Aug 04 '14 at 15:10

rapaio

6,394
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score 6 · Answer 117 · edited Jun 20 '12 at 18:18

6

Statistics' real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical.

Steve Vardeman and Max Morris

edited Jun 20 '12 at 18:18

David LeBauer

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answered May 28 '11 at 13:02

rolando2

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I wonder what he meant by that... – Tal Galili Sep 19 '11 at 08:47
Some possible interpretations...1. Thru statistics we teach the importance of empirical testing 2. Thru statistics we teach the importance of assessing the degree of uncertainty inherent in a topic 3. Through statistics we teach the importance of looking for confounding variables, or more generally of expanding our scope as we try to identify causal relationships. Do you have more ideas? – rolando2 Sep 19 '11 at 19:55
I would assume the meaning is that statistics and science are fundamentally about removing your own biases from your assessment of the world, and that such a noble goal could just as well be applied to moral debates. – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:49
My take on meaning: The search for the truth, and that anyone/everyone could be wrong about it. – probabilityislogic May 22 '15 at 02:00

score 6 · Answer 118 · answered Nov 13 '15 at 05:59

6

Not really about statistics, but works perfectly:

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." (Henri Poincaré)

answered Nov 13 '15 at 05:59

Nevio Dubbini

1
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score 6 · Answer 119 · answered Jan 28 '16 at 21:18

6

"The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the processes he applies or recommends." -- Sir Ronald A. Fisher in The Design of Experiments (1935)

answered Jan 28 '16 at 21:18

StatsStudent

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True, but the data scientist can. Understanding? We don't need no stinking understanding. – Mark L. Stone Jan 28 '16 at 21:28
Without understanding, no real progress can be made. – StatsStudent Jan 29 '16 at 05:49
1

Duplicate of an answer above. – Jul 07 '16 at 04:33

score 6 · Answer 120 · answered Sep 11 '10 at 15:37

We statisticians, as a police of science (a label some dislike but I am proud of...), have the fundamental duty of helping others to engage in statistical thinking as a necessary step of scientific inquiry and evidence-based policy formulation. In order to truly fulfill this task, we must constantly firm up and deepen our own foundation, and resist the temptation of competing for “methods and results” without pondering deeply whether we are helping others or actually harming them by effectively encouraging more false discoveries or misguided policies. Otherwise, we indeed can lose our identity, no matter how much we are desired or feared now.

Xiao-Li Meng

nice quote - and you can see the inherent "pessimism" in stats folk, for she speaks of "false discoveries" and not of "missed discoveries" (which are just as important). — probabilityislogic, Apr 03 '11 at 01:24

score 6 · Answer 121 · answered Mar 15 '17 at 08:50

Not yet famous, but could become so.

"If a problem can not be tackled nonparametrically, it is dangerous to tackle it parametrically. But on the other hand, if it can be tackled nonparametrically, it would be better to tackle it parametrically." -- Sir David Cox

Statistics - past, present and future, Royal Statistical Society 180th Anniversary Lecture near 16:27.

score 6 · Answer 122 · answered Jun 20 '12 at 14:14

6

"One death is a tragedy, 100,000 deaths are statistics."

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

answered Jun 20 '12 at 14:14

Zen

21,786
3
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114

score 6 · Answer 123 · answered Dec 03 '10 at 21:05

6

“Statistics is much like a streetlight. Not very enlightening, but nice for supporting you”

Storm P

answered Dec 03 '10 at 21:05

Allan Engelhardt

461
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2

4

Wasn't this based on an older variation? – Tal Galili May 27 '11 at 15:26

score 6 · Answer 124 · edited Aug 14 '11 at 15:03

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Also known as Laplace's demon

In French : http://philia.online.fr/txt/lapl_001.php – Jean Marie Becker Jan 17 '18 at 21:30 — Jean Marie Becker, Jan 17 '18 at 21:30

score 6 · Answer 125 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:20

6

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

~ Hillaire Belloc in The Silence of the Sea

answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:20

pramodc84

203
3
9

Hillaire Belloc? Nice work on digging that up. – Shane Jul 27 '10 at 16:43

score 5 · Answer 126 · answered Aug 05 '10 at 20:38

5

No statistican, but useful for the profession:

The perfect is the enemy of the good - Voltaire

answered Aug 05 '10 at 20:38

Roland Kofler

661
6
16

whuber · Answer 127 · 2010-08-17T22:11:08.277

5

CauseWeb has a collection of statistics quotations. Many have already been repeated here, but it has plenty that haven't yet been quoted, such as

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."

(Falsely attributed to Sir Winston Churchill.) For the rest, follow the CauseWeb links to Resources->Fun->Quote.

edited Aug 17 '10 at 22:11

answered Aug 13 '10 at 16:04

whuber

281,159
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score 5 · Answer 128 · answered Jan 28 '16 at 17:28

5

Many folks know only enough statistics to be dangerous. From Statistics for Dummies II - Deborah Rumsey

answered Jan 28 '16 at 17:28

Johan_A_M

35
1
8

score 5 · Answer 129 · edited Apr 23 '13 at 20:57

5

Good statistics involves principled argument that conveys an interesting and credible point.

-- Robert P. Abelson, (1995) "Statistics as Principled Argument"

We left in our mathematical model a gap for the exercise of a more intuitive process of personal judgement

-- Egon Pearson, quoted in Abelson (1995).

edited Apr 23 '13 at 20:57

Jeremy Miles

13,917
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answered Mar 28 '12 at 10:08

naught101

4,973
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score 5 · Answer 130 · answered Apr 16 '13 at 03:12

"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject. He remarks that, 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 do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician".

(Sherlock Holmes speaking to Dr. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of the Four")

score 5 · Answer 131 · answered Apr 23 '13 at 21:25

5

A table without stars is like champagne without bubbles! - David Giles

answered Apr 23 '13 at 21:25

dimitriy

31,081
5
63
138

score 5 · Answer 132 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:19

5

The Median Isn't the Message

--Stephen Jay Gould

answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:19

jilles de wit

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+1 For those who have not read it, I highly recommend Gould's 1985 [The Median Isn't the Message](http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/rice/Stat2/GouldCancer.html) essay in Discover. – jthetzel Jun 20 '12 at 16:58

score 5 · Answer 133 · edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:11

5

The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal thruths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of physical universe

-- Karl Pearson

edited Oct 02 '10 at 17:11

shabbychef

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answered Jul 27 '10 at 09:25

robin girard

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I guess I should remove it... poor Karl Pearson, one of the inventor of hypothesis testing not understood by the 21st century ... I would vote up if I could, but it's me that put it here :) – robin girard Jul 27 '10 at 18:31

score 5 · Answer 134 · answered Feb 06 '14 at 18:52

5

Data analysis is simply a dialogue with the data

--Stephen F. Gull, 1994

answered Feb 06 '14 at 18:52

omidi

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score 4 · Answer 135 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 03:17

Do not make things easy for yourself by speaking or thinking of data as if they were different from what they are; and do not go off from facing data as they are, to amuse your imagination by wishing they were different from what they are. Such wishing is pure waste of nerve force, weakens your intellectual power, and gets you into habits of mental confusion.

--Mary Everest Boole

score 4 · Answer 136 · answered Aug 17 '10 at 08:29

4

It's not really about statistics, but I think it applies to statistics:

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.

Arthur Conan Doyle

answered Aug 17 '10 at 08:29

nikie

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@user956 - I would disagree with this. Neither theory nor experiment are "in charge" of the other - they work together. Sometimes the theory leads to an experiment, we have an untested hypothesis we want to confirm or deny with some data. – probabilityislogic Apr 03 '11 at 01:20
Some times data leads to an over fitted model, too. – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:38

score 4 · Answer 137 · answered Dec 13 '17 at 05:44

[T]he p-value is the probability of obtaining data at least as extreme as the ones observed, if the null hypothesis is true. This is a world apart from saying that it is the probability of the null hypothesis being true, given that you observed that extreme data! Beware! If your ability on the long jump puts you in the 99.99% percentile, that does not mean that you are a kangaroo, and neither can one infer that the probability that you belong to the human race is 0.01%. - Tomasso Dorigo

score 4 · Answer 138 · edited Nov 03 '12 at 10:53

4

Check out "Statistician's Blues" by Todd Snider who is an alternative-country singer-songwriter. Warning, if you are sensitive to "bad" words, don't listen to the song. If you have a good or perhaps twisted sense of humor you will enjoy.

edited Nov 03 '12 at 10:53

naught101

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answered Aug 01 '12 at 04:44

RioRaider

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score 3 · Answer 139 · answered Aug 04 '14 at 17:20

3

Perhaps not overly famous among statisticians but reduced-form econometricians will know it well:

If you can't see the causal relation of interest in the reduced form, it's probably not there.

Angrist and Krueger (2001)

answered Aug 04 '14 at 17:20

Andy

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score 3 · Answer 140 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:44

3

A variation on the Fisher quotation given here is

Hiring a statistician after the data have been collected is like hiring a physician when your patient is in the morgue. He may be able to tell you what went wrong, but he is unlikely to be able to fix it.

But I heard this attributed to Box, not Fisher.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:44

Community

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answered Aug 03 '10 at 20:07

Peter Flom

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Edited to disambiguate 'above.' – Larry Wang Aug 03 '10 at 20:10

score 3 · Answer 141 · answered Dec 05 '15 at 19:34

3

Statistics without science is incomplete, science without statistics is imperfect.

K.V. Mardia

answered Dec 05 '15 at 19:34

epsilone

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score 3 · Answer 142 · edited Jun 11 '20 at 14:32

An intense preoccupation with the latest minutiae and indifference to the social and intellectual forces of tradition and revolutionary change, combine to produce the Mandarinism that some would now say already characterizes academic statistical theory and is most likely to describe its immediate future.

The statisticians of the past came into the subject from other fields - astronomy, pure mathematics, genetics, agronomy, economics etc. — and created their statistical methodology with a background of training for a specific scientific discipline and a feeling for its current needs. So for the future I recommend we work on interesting problems and avoid dogmatism.

-- Herbert Robbins in "Wither Mathematical Statistics?" as quoted by Peter J. Huber in "Speculations on the Path of Statistics".

Robbins, Herbert. "Wither Mathematical Statistics?" Advances in Applied Probability 7 (1975): 116-21. doi:10.2307/1426316.

Brillinger, D. R., L. T. Fernholz, and S. Morgenthaler, eds. The Practice of Data Analysis: Essays in Honor of John W. Tukey. Princeton University Press, 1997. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zthdd.

Wither? That's a harsh assessment of the future of mathematical statistics! — Dilip Sarwate, Mar 22 '18 at 04:09
This was written in the spirit of Tukey's "Future of Data Analysis" and Peter Huber was invoking others like Robbins who have said similar things. — user3303, Mar 22 '18 at 04:32

score 3 · Answer 143 · answered Sep 08 '18 at 02:37

In his Fisher lecture, Box defines mathematistry as

the development of theory for theory's sake, which, since it seldom touches down with practice, has a tendency to redefine the problem rather than solve it. Typically, there has once been a statistical problem with scientific relevance but this has long since been lost sight of.

He also defines cookbookery as

The tendency to force all problems into the molds of one or two routine techniques, insufficient thought being given to the real objectives of the investigation or to the relevance of the assumptions implied by the imposed methods.

References

Box, G. E. P. 1976. Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71: 791–799.

Roderick J. Little (2013) In Praise of Simplicity not Mathematistry! Ten Simple Powerful Ideas for the Statistical Scientist, Journal of the American Statistical Association

score 3 · Answer 144 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:14

An argument over the meaning of words is a matter of law, an argument grounded in empirical data and quantitative estimates is an argument about science.

~ Razib Khan (though he is not a statistician or famous)

score 2 · Answer 145 · edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:03

2

...Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress.

--George Box 1992

edited Dec 03 '10 at 04:03

shabbychef

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answered Aug 06 '10 at 11:23

PaulHurleyuk

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Cliff AB · Answer 146 · 2020-06-01T15:01:00.210

2

This is a two part quote I've heard a few times:

Machine learning is statistics minus any checking of models and assumptions.

Brian D. Ripley

In that case, maybe we should get rid of checking of models and assumptions more often. Then maybe we'd be able to solve some of the problems that the machine learning people can solve but we can't!

Andrew Gelman

Link (Ripley is quoted as making the statement at the useR forum, Gelman responds to the quote on his blog).

There's some irony in the sides taken by these two statisticians in this conversation. That is, some of Brian Ripley's early work was on Neural Networks, which is an extremely popular topic in Machine Learning, where as Andrew Gelman is exclusively known for Bayesian statistics in which he advocates taking one's statistical models very seriously.

edited Jun 01 '20 at 15:01

answered Jul 23 '19 at 00:31

Cliff AB

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@usεr11852: what part about it being a rant is a problem in my quote? And I think that exactly the point: for a long time statisticians (btw, I am one) ranted about ML approaches, while these approaches continuously got very positive results on problems statisticians had essentially given up on. – Cliff AB Jun 01 '20 at 14:56
@usεr11852: also I updated the post to include a link. – Cliff AB Jun 01 '20 at 15:04
I dislike/I do not find it useful as a quote. (Obviously I have nothing against your technical answers here or BDR's great achievements as a statistician.) – usεr11852 Jun 01 '20 at 15:21

score 2 · Answer 147 · answered Nov 09 '19 at 01:52

2

A statistical procedure is not an automatic, mechanical truth-generating machine

Meehl (1992)

answered Nov 09 '19 at 01:52

PsychometStats

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score 2 · Answer 148 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:25

2

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

~ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839) ch. 2

answered Jul 27 '10 at 14:25

pramodc84

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an enlightened customer said "try proving anything without them..." :) – probabilityislogic May 28 '11 at 13:50
@probabilityislogic *"cogito ergo sum"*? :P – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:43

score 1 · Answer 149 · answered Nov 01 '17 at 00:47

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the chowkidar (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases [link].

-- Josiah Stamp, recounting a story from Harold Cox, Some Economic Factors in Modern Life (1929), p. 258.

score 1 · Answer 150 · answered Jul 29 '20 at 07:59

1

The problem of modern day governments is that they try to get more than half the people above the median levels of income, health, happiness, education etc.

answered Jul 29 '20 at 07:59

Sextus Empiricus

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Source of the quote? – usεr11852 Jul 29 '20 at 08:25

score -2 · Answer 151 · answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:50

-2

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Michael Crichton

answered Jul 27 '10 at 16:50

Harvey Motulsky

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It's unfortunate that consensus has so much control over what kind of science gets funded. – Sharpie Jul 31 '10 at 18:26
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That's because consensus is a practical means of establishing the validity of a scientific position. Sound science cannot be conducted by a single person. It requires peer review. Having achieved a popular consensus implies that the science in question has passed peer review. Whereas a theory or position held by a lone individual and opposed by the rest of the scientific community is likely to have failed the process of peer review. If you're not an expert in field X, then statistically you're better off following popular consensus within field X. – Lèse majesté Aug 05 '10 at 00:50
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To elaborate: if you're a politician who has no background in field X, then it is far better that you simply consult the consensus of experts in that field of research than to misinterpret the data first-hand. What is problematic is when lay persons disregard overwhelming scientific consensus for data misrepresented to them by a fringe minority--especially when these lay persons are in charge of policy decisions. It's much easier to mislead a handful of politicians than thousands of expert researchers... – Lèse majesté Aug 05 '10 at 01:02
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-1 This is an intellectually dishonest quote from a bad novelist, playing up a popular romantic myth of scientists as Rand-esque revolutionary loners in order to pander to anti-science crankery. Moreover, it has nothing whatsoever to do with statistics. What is it even doing in this list? – walkytalky Aug 07 '10 at 14:34
-1, see what @walkytalky and @Lèse majesté said. – fabians Dec 03 '10 at 12:00
2

(-1) also (concur with @walkytalky), and @lese - note that "...consult the consensus of experts in that field of research than to misinterpret the data first-hand" can be cheekily rebutted by "I consult the experts so that I can mis-interpret the data second-hand". – probabilityislogic Jan 30 '11 at 10:38
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*"[Consensus](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus): General agreement among the members of a given group or community, each of which exercises some discretion in decision-making and follow-up action"* - fairly fitting, and **not**, as various climate deniers would have you believe, equivalent to "100% agreement, no questions asked". – naught101 Mar 28 '12 at 09:58
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What's the scientific consensus on the scientific validity of this quote? – Mark L. Stone Aug 04 '15 at 15:49
1

Quite apart from lacking statistical content, the quotation seems almost complete nonsense. Even scientific revolutionaries end up changing the consensus, and most mavericks and cranks in science are precisely that, mavericks and cranks. As for consensus in politics, that's hard to discern. – Nick Cox Jan 29 '16 at 14:37
Plogiston theory, Phenology, Epicycles and numerous other consensus theories are now discredited by consensus. What then about consensus is reliable? On the other hand, what about consensus is relevant to a mathematical proof? Worse there are truths, e.g., mathematical ones, that can be stated but are not provable., see Gödel's incompleteness theorems. However, any particular complete proposition is either true or not, nor does consensus affect truth value. Many mavericks are called and few are chosen, but to change a consensus only mavericks need apply. – Carl Feb 21 '22 at 01:08

Famous statistical quotations

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