Thomas Sowell Quotes

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

The big mystery of Big Data is causation versus correlation.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

[Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics.

Much of what I do in my job is think about whether relationships we see in data are causal, as opposed to just reflecting correlations. It's exactly these issues which come up in evaluating studies in public health.

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

We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.

But to measure cause and effect... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies?

[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.

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They 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.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

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

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

Biases and blind spots exist in big data as much as they do in individual perceptions and experiences. Yet there is a problematic belief that bigger data is always better data and that correlation is as good as causation.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

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

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.

Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.