Quotes by Statisticians

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Nate Silver
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction.
E. E. Schumacher
I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.
Florence Nightingale
I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.
Florence Nightingale
The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.
Florence Nightingale
I could prove God statistically.
George Gallup
One's feelings waste themselves in words they ought all to be distilled into action ... which bring results.
Florence Nightingale
Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
Robert S. Lund
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
Florence Nightingale
A human being does not cease to exist at death. It is change not destruction which takes place.
Florence Nightingale
Were there none who were discontented with what they have the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers.
Edward R. Tufte
Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.
Florence Nightingale
. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Luck is the grand equalizer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful
George E.P. Box
...it would not be quite right to say that the problem is unsolvable in principle; only so complicated that it is not worth anybody’s time to think about it. So what do we do?In probability theory there is a very clever trick for handling a problem that becomes too difficult. We just solve it anyway by:(1)  making it still harder;(2)  redefining what we mean by ‘solving’ it, so that it becomes something we can do;(3)  inventing a dignified and technical-sounding word to describe this procedure, which has the psychological effect of concealing the real nature of what we have done, and making it appear respectable.
E. T. Jaynes
The person you're most afraid to contradict is yourself.
Nassim Taleb
Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
...the ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.
Nate Silver
We see the world as less random than it actually is.
Nassim Taleb
Being a hero is the easiest way to meet a bullet with your name on it.
David Kendall
Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity.
Francis Galton
If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If skeptic can weakly force E, then he can force E.
Glenn Shafer
I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices - but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just "picking pennies in front of a steamroller," exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it.
Nassem Nicholas Taleb
There are two main reasons why this assumption is wrong. First, once basic material needs have been met, there is very little evidence that pursuing financial prosperity generates much extra happiness for individuals or for nations. Second, by blindly pursuing economic growth, we are creating a whole set of social and environmental issues that will undermine the potential happiness and well-being of future generations.
Nic Marks
The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability.
Nic Marks
Much of modern life is based upon a false logic, a logic that assumes that happiness and well-being come from financial prosperity.
Nic Marks
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts...
Nic Marks
A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.
Nate Silver
Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
Nate Silver
Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.
Nate Silver
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Being self-owned is a state of mind.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what’s going on.Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Love without sacrifice is like theft
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion.
Adolphe Quetelet
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb