Francis Galton Quotes
It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once.
Galton, Francis. Natural Inheritance. Macmillan, 1889, p. 62.
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.
Sir Francis Galton, FRS, was an English Victorian era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician and a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific racism. He was knighted in 1909.
