Quantitative Analysis Quotes

To measure is to know. If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts

Men of learning began to set experiments aside...to form theories...and to substitute these in the place of experiments.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

Our view is that the very best data miners or statisticians can earn as much as the very best golfers or tennis players.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.

Number is different from quantity. This difference is basic for any sort of theorizing in behavioral science, any sort of imagining of what goes on between organisms or inside organisms as part of their processes of thought.

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations.

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications.

Art is very subjective and having to put numbers on it seems counterintuitive.

In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

All science requires mathematics.

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.

We’re not used to calculating large amounts of data. Our brains think anecdotally.

I'm precise. I think in proportions. I play games with numbers, and I proportionalise.

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.