Charlie Munger Quotes

The greatest moments are those when you see the result pop up in a graph or in your statistics analysis - that moment you realise you know something no one else does and you get the pleasure of thinking about how to tell them.

The statistics might have a Eurosceptic cast, but they are not exactly a fun read. Few of us want to wade through ONS graphs or European Commission tables.

When I look at a pie chart, I just go numb.

So this is the only TV show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever.

We must never let a blizzard of statistics blind us to the real lives and people behind them.

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

If we just focus on stats, we're gonna eventually not have them.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in business, so is a number.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.

There is a reasonable concern that posting raw data can be misleading for those who are not trained in its use and who do not have the broader perspective within which to place a particular piece of data that is raw.

The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you.

Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.

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

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

My big thesis is that although the world looks messy and chaotic, if you translate it into the world of numbers and shapes, patterns emerge and you start to understand why things are the way they are.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.

To understand God’s thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.

The numbers are hard to control.

The big mystery of Big Data is causation versus correlation.

A lot of people seem to think that data science is just a process of adding up a bunch of data and looking at the results, but that's actually not at all what the process is.