Michael Gerber Quotes
Everywhere you turn, there are lists and statistics. Any business, any sport, any hobby - we will try to categorize who is the best at some component of that endeavor. It's part human nature and part technology, since we have been conditioned to have access to answers and trivial problems at our fingertips.
See {611311} for a later similar view.
See {234968} for an earlier, similar view.
It means that we do not know what people are like until we have the right situations.
{627488} is an earlier quotation by a French Diplomat of very similar sentiment, but it is not known if Stalin had ever seen it. Also See Beilby Porteus {627489} for an 18th century variation. This is a puzzling phenomenon. In the United States if there is a plane crash and a hundred people are killed, it is page one and television lead news. But between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans die each year, one or two at a time in auto crashes, and it does not seem to be news. More American college students commit suicide (about 1200 a year) then are killed in mining or other industrial accidents, but the former we rarely hear about.
The mathematics of modern statistical analysis are excellent, but there are many ways to end up with invalid results by making important errors in gathering the numbers which are then used to calculate the statistics. Often the sample is inadvertently or intentionally biased. Sometimes it is incomplete. Very frequently, the measures do not measure well what someone says they do measure. There are many other ways to mess up a statistical analysis, and is it those critical processes details that Gomez Hurtado tells us all to be worried about. He uses the analogy of blood sausage, which tastes delicious can be made with unsavory and unhealthy ingredients sometimes, and even when made right is a bit shocking to most people to watch the process.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Michael Gerber is best known as the author of the Barry Trotter series, Sunday Times best-selling parodies of the Harry Potter books. Before becoming a novelist, Gerber contributed humor to The Yale Record, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, NPR and Saturday Night Live, among many other venues. He is an alumnus of Yale and Oak Park River Forest High School.
