Statistical Thinking Quotes

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.

Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go and informed by fairly good judgment.

I have never been a stats person.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

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

The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex worldwide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

There's been the emergence of a philosophy that big data is all you need. We would suggest that, actually, numbers don't speak for themselves.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

We must understand variation.

One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone.