Statistical Quotes

I like to do projects in which you can see statistical results. I am very happy for all these small children, who have been the biggest group of victims of iodine deficiency.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.

An old friend of mine, an economist by trade, once explained to me that the statistical definition of ‘dilemma’ is 49.9% in favor and 50.1% against. If the gap is greater, there is no dilemma, because the answer is clear.

Inch for inch, the 6-foot-3 Westbrook is the NBA’s most sensationally talented player, a relentlessly explosive basket-attacker with a deadly pull-up jumper – a top-10 NBA player by any big-picture statistical measure from Player Efficiency Rating to Win Shares.

Without bragging, I’ve been blessed to have five of the greatest statistical years for a running back.

If a player digests his own statistical information in his own time, on his own laptop, tablet or whatever, without a coach standing over him, it makes it easier for him. It helps with the pressure. There’s a fear factor but spending time at home analysing things can help control it.

When we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you’re doing when you wake up each day.

My very first publication was an estimator – this was a statistical procedure – a kind of invention. My father got a patent and started a business; it wasn’t successful, but maybe I have some of him in me.

When you get into statistical analysis, you don’t really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by ‘The Onion’ – or be the subject of a cartoon in ‘The New Yorker.’ I guess I’m kind of an outlier there.

It’s an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical – it is in any animal merely statistical – not deterministic.

Statistical studies are all over the lot about the pluses and minuses of raising the minimum wage.

I think I’ve read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called ‘The Philadelphia Negro’. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.

There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.

By relying on the statistical information rather than a gut feeling, you allow the data to lead you to be in the right place at the right time. To remain as emotionally free from the hurly burley of the here and now is one of the only ways to succeed.

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

We are going to completely change what it means to do advanced analytics with our data solutions. We have machine-learning stuff that is about really bringing advanced analytics and statistical machine learning into data-science departments everywhere.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it’s also one on temporality too. Statistics – even when accurate – are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That’s just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

For thirty years, I’ve been hearing that it’s getting better for women. And until I see statistical proof over enough years that that’s true, I won’t believe it.

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.

Modi has misused institutions like the ED, Intelligence Bureau, CBI, RBI and National Statistical Commission for political gains and harassing his political opponents. Modi lost his credibility by all these acts.

We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.

None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I’m not saying that at all.

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination… Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge ‘social wealth’ that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.

Fairness is not about statistical equality.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality – which indeed may be a rare achievement.

National data on evictions aren’t collected, although national data on foreclosures are. And so if anyone wants to, kind of, get to know any statistical research about evictions, they have to really dig in the annals of legal records.

I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.

Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.

There’s no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It’s next to impossible.