Inferential Statistics Quotes

What interests me is the experience of ordinary people. To tell you the truth, although I can repeat certain dates, statistics, and so on, what I am really curious about is what happens to ordinary men, women, and children in extraordinary times. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

Some things are to hard to believe, however entertaining they might be to hear or read. ~ Hal Clement

Robert Kennedy identified with people, not data, or institutions, or theories. Poverty was a specific black face for him, not a manila folder full of statistics. ~ Jack Newfield

I have to absorb the new season like sunlight, letting it turn my winter skin pink and then brown. I must stuff myself with lore and statistics until my fingers ooze balm. ~ W.P. Kinsella

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there's unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies... And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won't find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery. But we don't hear or see those who suffer: the real tragedies of life are enacted somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is calm and peaceful and the only protest comes from statistics - and they can't talk. Figures show that so many went mad, so many bottles of vodka were emptied, so many children died from malnutrition. And clearly this kind of system is what people need. It,s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at t ~ Anton Chekhov

It's the bell curve again," I said to Ishtar. "If - as Lazarus thinks, and statistics back him up - every migration comes primarily from the right-hand end of the normal-incidence curve of human ability, then this acts as a sorting device whereby the new planet will show a bell curve with a much higher intelligence norm than the population it came from…and the old planet will average almost imperceptibly stupider."

"Imperceptible except for one thing!" Lazarus objected.

"That tiny fraction that hardly shows statistically is the brain. I recall a country that lost a key war by chasing out a mere half dozen geniuses. Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run these are the only people who count and they are the very ones who migrate when it is physically possible to do so ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Remember a person with Autism isn't a set of symptoms or statistics always remember and remind them that they're a person first. ~ Paul Isaacs

Those meaningless and unanswerable questions the minds keep returning to, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

At school you were taught about chemicals in test tubes, equations to describe motion, and maybe something on photosynthesis - about which more later - but in all likelihood you were taught nothing about death, risk, statistics, and the science of what will kill or cure you. ~ Ben Goldacre

Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans. ~ Thomas Sowell

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1975, 31 percent of college teachers were female; by 2009, the number had grown to 49.2 percent.7 There are more women teaching in college than ever, and it is quite possible that their presence, coupled with our discovery of the postmodern narrative, has had a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought. Strong winds of compassion blow across campus quads. Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone's underdog status. Many of the female adjuncts I have spoken to seem blessed and cursed by feelings of maternity toward the students. Women think about their actions, and the consequences of their actions, in a deeper way than do men. ~ Professor X.

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can. ~ Mark Twain

Facts speak louder than statistics. ~ Geoffrey Streatfeild

If you torture statistics long enough, they'll eventually confess the truth ~ Alan K. Simpson

We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures. We succeeded because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls which indicated that 85 percent of the public favored unrestricted abortion, when we knew it was only 5 percent. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law. ~ Bernard Nathanson

So just take a look at the different prosecution rates and sentencing rules for ghetto drugs like crack and suburban drugs like cocaine, or for drunk drivers and drug users, or just between blacks and whites in general―the statistics are clear: this is a war on the poor and minorities. Or ask yourself a simple question: how come marijuana is illegal but tobacco legal? It can't be because of the health impact, because that's exactly the other way around―there has never been a fatality from marijuana use among million reported users in the United States, whereas tobacco kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. My strong suspicion, though I don't know how to prove it, is that the reason is that marijuana's a weed, you can grow it in your backyard, so there's nobody who would make any money off it if it were legal. Tobacco requires extensive capital inputs and technology, and it can be monopolized, so there are people who can make a ton of money off it. I don't really see any other difference between the two of them, frankly―except that tobacco's far more lethal and far more addictive. ~ Noam Chomsky

The truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes, or under other horrific conditions and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children. And though at first glance that looks like a big number, 2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians. The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left. ~ Katie J. Davis

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began.

In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years.

I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional. ~ Jeanine Cummins

David has scored 62 goals in 148 games for Ipswich and those statistics tell me that he plays games and scores goals.
(on David Johnson) ~ David Platt

The master of superstition, is the people; and in all superstition, wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order. ~ Francis Bacon

Be as happy as you want to be in a world gone mad. Be as safe as you want to be in a world that is afraid of everything. Be as healthy as you want to be in a world that is mostly sick. Don't let the statistics that someone else created affect you. ~ Esther Hicks

If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. ~ Bill Gosper

If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment. ~ Ernest Rutherford

There is a liberal bias. It's demonstrable. You look at some statistics. About 85 percent of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. There is a, particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias. ~ Evan Thomas

I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I'm not kidding. ~ Hal Varian

The Place of No Shadows, in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine (1990) In our Universe, matter is arranged in a hierarchy of structures by successive integrations. ~ Francois Jacob

A third position has been called "strong Al." When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program. ~ George Lakoff

He uses statistics like a drunk uses lamp-posts, more for support than illumination. ~ Romano Prodi

To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it. ~ Quentin Crisp

Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all. ~ Natalie Haynes

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there. ~ Lev Grossman

All those statistics that you are gathering about your own experiences and about others are only about how somebody has flowed Energy. It isn't about any hard fast reality. ~ Esther Hicks

The actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation. ~ Ronald Fisher

The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice. ~ Richard Bach

You may note the irony. In the context of the cab problem, the neglect of base-rate information is a cognitive flaw, a failure of Bayesian reasoning, and the reliance on causal base rates is desirable. Stereotyping the Green drivers improves the accuracy of judgment. In other contexts, however, such as hiring or profiling, there is a strong social norm against stereotyping, which is also embedded in the law. This is as it should be. In sensitive social contexts, we do not want to draw possibly erroneous conclusions about the individual from the statistics of the group. We consider it morally desirable for base rates to be treated as statistical facts about the group rather than as presumptive facts about individuals. In other words, we reject causal base rates. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Coincidence", he finally said. "Statisticans looking for connections can always find odd coincidences and statistical anomalies, if they try hard enough. ~ Brandon Sanderson

A vast army of government employees [Central, state and local government] of around 20 million are taken care by the remaining 380 million of the workforce, which also meets the extortionate and rent-seeking demands of the government employees. ~ R. Vaidyanathan

In our society competitive capitalism has put family life and working life on a collision course.In Canada statistics show that over 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled and the sick falls on women most of whom receive no pay for these very essential tasks.Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of capitalism, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and thus increase the gap between them. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru