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Cross ValidatedFamous statistical quotations
[+282] [153] robin girard
[2010-07-27 06:20:38]
[ references history ]
[ https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistical-quotations ]

What is your favorite statistical quote?

This is community wiki, so please one quote per answer.

(11) Should this question really be "famous quotes about statistics"? - naught101
[+277] [2010-07-27 06:37:30] Rob Hyndman

All models are wrong, but some are useful. (George E. P. Box)

Reference: Box & Draper (1987), Empirical model-building and response surfaces, Wiley, p. 424.

Also: G.E.P. Box (1979), "Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building" in Robustness in Statistics (Launer & Wilkinson eds.), p. 202.


(5) I use this quote a lot to explain the difficulties in mathematicians transitioning to statistics - user549
(28) This sentence itself is a model (an epistemological one) - user603
(6) but see a nice discussion around this quote on Gelman's blog, j.mp/9SgIBO - chl
(14) And this is an actual quote, as opposed to something "attributed to" Box. It appears, e.g., in Box & Draper (1987), Empirical model-building and response surfaces, Wiley, on page 424. Yes, I did go and look it up before using it in a paper. - Stephan Kolassa
(20) Sadly, too many people use it to excuse themselves from the flaws in their models. In my personal experience, it's usage is an alarm sign. - JohnRos
(3) I prefer the extended version: "...all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" (Box & Draper, 2007, "Response Surfaces, Mixtures, and Ridge Analyses", p. 414) - Tim
Taken out of context it is a meaningless and even misleading statement. A model helps us understand the world by simplification and by disregarding anomalies, so obviously any model is "wrong" in any literal sense of the word. Furthermore, usefulness should not generally be a criterion for model selection, e.g., a poor model ("climate change is not man made") can still be very useful for nefarious (and other) purposes. - Wicher
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[+235] [2010-07-27 08:42:23] John D. Cook

"An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem." -- John Tukey


(16) I like this one, could be put as an advise when people write questions on this site ? - robin girard
(9) Absolutely...asking the right question is one of the most important skills. - Shane
(7) I remember once where a private industry company commissioned a mathematician to solve a garbage collection routing problem. Long story short, the mathematician complained that the company was only interested in finding a "close enough" solution rather than an optimal solution. I think, ultimately he was fired, and an operations researcher was brought in instead. - dassouki
(2) @dassouki I think the quote is more about the question .... something like science is not about finding good answer but about finding good questions ! - robin girard
(1) This reminds me of a quote made by Edwin Jaynes. It roughly goes "...a mathematician came to me and said 'I found a brilliant solution, all I need now is the problem'..." - probabilityislogic
(19) "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise." John W. Tukey 1962 The future of data analysis. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33: 1-67 (see pp.13-14) No doubt he said similar things at other times, but that's a precise source, and the version I usually see quoted. - Nick Cox
(1) @NickCox +1 the quote with the 'wrong question' is preferable being much clearer and less debateable than the one with 'an approximate problem'. It can be incredibly valuable solving an approximate problem exactly ( in science at least. ) - PM.
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[+154] [2010-07-27 07:41:56] sjcockell

"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."

-- Ronald Fisher (1938)

The quotation can be read on page 17 of the article.

R. A. Fisher. Presidential Address by Professor R. A. Fisher, Sc.D., F.R.S. Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933-1960), Vol. 4, No. 1 (1938), pp. 14-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40383882


I read a slightly different version of this quote by Fisher: "Hiring a physician after the data have been collected is like hiring a physician when the patient is in the morgue. He may be able to tell you what went wrong, but he is unlikely to be able to fix it." - Peter Flom
(2) @Peter Was it really "Hiring a physician after the data ..." or should "statistician" be in there somewhere? - Dason
(3) @dason You're right! Someone edited my post, I think - Peter Flom
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[+141] [2010-08-05 02:42:11] Eric Petroelje

87% of statistics are made up on the spot

-Unknown

Dilbert.com Dilbert.com [1]

[1] http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/

(4) imgur.com/0dsVC.gif - J. M. is not a statistician
(1) And 45.8% of people don't believe that statistic - probabilityislogic
ROFL ROFL Scott Adams kills me - Hack-R
Ha! Every time I see a forecast that contains too many significant digits I think of this quote. "The number of cell phone owners is forecast to be 4,372,138,975 by the year 2020." Really? As if anyone could forecast better than 4.3B or 4.4B. - JTP - Apologise to Monica
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[+138] [2010-07-27 06:36:26] Rob Hyndman

In God we trust. All others must bring data.

(W. Edwards Deming)


(71) God must bring data too. - KalEl
(9) God can make up data. - Leo
(7) @Leo What data do you have to support that hypothesis? :) - probabilityislogic
(3) Ooh, is that a new version of the Omnipotence Paradox? If god made up new data, how could you prove that it wasn't there all along? - naught101
(5) It's axiomatically true. - abaumann
(2) A great quote and a great man; debatably a great quote from a great man. - Jack Ryan
Ironically there does not seem to be any data suggesting the quote belongs to Deming! - Luca
An attempted editor argues, "Should be B. Joiner. This is a misattribution that got multiplied because of the mistaken reference in Hastie, Tibsharni and Freedman. They never corrected it. The correct reference is Joiner, B.L. (1985). The key role of statisticians in the transformation of North American industry.American Statistician 39(3): 233–234." - gung - Reinstate Monica
It looks like it goes back earlier than either Deming or Joiner. See quoteinvestigator.com/2017/12/29/god-data. - Rob Hyndman
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[+137] [2010-08-06 01:26:54] Thylacoleo

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

-- George Box


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[+130] [2010-07-27 09:22:04] jilles de wit

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

-Aaron Levenstein


(12) And life's more fun without them? Guess you can only take a metaphor so far... - naught101
This just became my favorite quote - Ali Turab Lotia
This maybe? en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Statistics slightly different phrasing though. If you google the entire quote I'm not the only one using it, but no source. - jilles de wit
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[+119] [2010-08-08 23:05:17] Meh

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

-- Niels Bohr


(21) Prediction about the past can also be surprisingly tricky! - walkytalky
(5) This one has been attributed to many different people larry.denenberg.com/predictions.html and it's disputed that it would be Niels Bohr en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr - gerrit
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[+119] [2010-08-23 13:47:21] Eric Stolen

If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.

--Ronald Coase (quoted from Coase, R. H. 1982. How should economists chose? American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D. C.). I think most who hear this quote misunderstand its profound message against data dredging.


(1) Yes, your explanation is highly needed. I can imagine that many would take away the complete opposite meaning from the quote. Note to myself, even torture of ideas is evil. - Aditya P
(1) The answer and the above comment are both cryptically hinting that this quote is frequently misinterpreted. How is it misinterpreted? Could somebody just explicitly interpret this quote if the meaning is unclear? I took the quote to mean that for example if you perform dozens of hypothesis tests on a dataset you will eventually get a small $p$-value by sheer luck. Or, in other words, you will find things that look statistically significant but which are merely flukes. Is that the correct interpretation? - littleO
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[+108] [2010-07-29 10:57:18] aL3xa

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Mark Twain


This is brilliant! - probabilityislogic
It is, except are there any generalisations that are entirely true? - naught101
(2) @naught101 Definitions and the laws of nature (once we know them) are generalizations that I consider true. Though the former are not very interesting as in: all "true generalizations" are true. - ziggystar
Not necessarily false. It is true probabilistically. - hbadger19042
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[+104] [2010-07-27 09:09:25] Paolo

A big computer, a complex algorithm and a long time does not equal science.

-- Robert Gentleman


(53) Still it looks promising. - user88
(5) Just curious, where did he say/write that? - Hack-R
Well well well... how the turn tables - Snehal
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[+97] [2010-07-27 16:23:12] Michael Bishop

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

--H.G. Wells


By God, he was right! - KalEl
(18) I don't know, you've seen many efficient citizens lately? - Raskolnikov
(4) Still waiting... - naught101
(1) An anonymous user asked for a source for this 'quote'; he/she also indicated that Gigerenzer noted that he searched Wells published output in vain for the original. - chl
quora.com/… - Axle Max
(1) There's a published article that also goes into debunking this quotation. Tankard, J.W. (1979). The H.G. Wells Quote on Statistics: A Question of Accuracy. Historia Mathematica 6: 30-33. - Phil
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[+95] [2010-07-27 06:23:57] robin girard

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data

Tukey


(8) As a biological scientist, I find myself muttering this to myself during a lot of seminars... - N Brouwer
(1) This should be taught in management school long before the chapter on KPI calculation - rumtscho
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[+89] [2010-07-27 07:26:34] Tzippy

There are no routine statistical questions, only questionable statistical routines.

D.R. Cox


(3) Rolf Sundberg attributed this quote to J.M. Hammersley in a 1994 article: dx.doi.org/10.1016/0169-7439(93)E0041-2 - onestop
(1) The following was an attempted edit by an anonymous user: "Comment: It is told after the qoute that I have attributed this (excellent) quote to Hammersley. The reason for my attribution of it to Hammersley was that I asked David Cox before I used the quote, and he answered that it was not originally his, but Hammersley's phrasing. Rolf Sundberg". - gung - Reinstate Monica
This is wrong - evidence? - t testing and p values! routine calculations done all the time. sure it may be "questionable" but it is still routine! - probabilityislogic
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[+86] [2010-11-07 23:16:13] Kieran

Statistics - A subject which most statisticians find difficult but which many physicians are experts on. "Stephen S. Senn"


(3) Credit: Stephen Senn, Statistical Issues in Drug Development, page4. media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/71/04700187/0470018771.‌​pdf - onestop
(2) I think its because physics has a similar level of pedantry required for statistics, and the physicist has the huge benefit of wanting to get rid of uncertainty, the statistician just wants to describe it. - probabilityislogic
(28) Physicians $\neq$ physicists - David Roberts
(2) This may be my new favorite - Fomite
(2) Although I could imagine this applying to physicists as well. - WetlabStudent
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[+84] [2010-08-17 02:01:44] Neil McGuigan

He uses statistics like a drunken man uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.

-- Andrew Lang


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[+80] [2010-07-27 06:51:24] ars

Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring.

-- Charlie Chan [1]

[1] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200691.txt

(14) I don't mind the down vote, but I maintain that this is a deep statistical point, not to be taken lightly. ;-) - ars
Especially if you are in the financial services sector. - DWin
(3) I would say that the key to cracking the meaning of this quote is to recognise that the word "strange" is relative to what your model of "normal" is. - probabilityislogic
(2) I this just a verbose way of saying "outliers happen", or is there something deeper I'm missing? - naught101
A similar quote that I like is “With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen" (Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller). - MattBagg
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[+80] [2010-07-31 15:36:12] Tal Galili

A nice one I came about:

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

By Richard Feynman ( link [1])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1tKEvN3DF0

If I was a betting man I'd say Richard Feynman was an agnostic - probabilityislogic
(2) Does Feynman qualify as a statistician? - Glen_b
Nice one but Thomas Gray puts it better "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." - Marco Stamazza
(3) @Glen_b Actually the question is "What is your favorite statistical quote?" not "What is your favorite quote of a statician?" - user248711
As far as I can see the intent of the quote is not statistical either. - Glen_b
(1) I like this one a lot: "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer." - Richard Feynman - Galen
I agree the intent is not statistical. But I find it to be rather tied to our field. - Tal Galili
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[+77] [2010-08-06 01:08:05] Thylacoleo

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

-- John Tukey

(This is MY favourite Tukey quote)


(6) Love this one -- a wonderful bonus of being a statistician. - Kingsford Jones
I'm unsure what this one means. Is that because statistics applies to almost every field? - Ali Turab Lotia
@Ali, I believe that's the general intent. Statistics can be a very powerful epistemological framework which has found use in multiple fields with extremely complex systems (biology, economics, epidemiology, climate science, etc). - Ashe
This is precisely why I got into the field, i'm nosy! - adunaic
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[+69] [2010-07-28 06:49:12] Tzippy

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Martin Rees [1] ( Wikipedia [2])

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Rees
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence

(73) Good quote, but it's not true! Absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it certainly is evidence. Why do we think magnetic monopoles (or unicorns, for that matter) don't exist? Because we've looked and haven't found any. - John D. Cook
(13) Besides, Tzippy is misquoting Sagan, since Sagan never believed that. He in fact listed it among the fallacies in his baloney detecion kit. - Raskolnikov
(8) @JohnD.Cook, +1. However, your comment relies on the fact that we have looked, and that there was a reasonable chance of having found evidence if it really were there; consider, for example, the various 'missing links' that were ultimately found (and those that have not yet been). - gung - Reinstate Monica
Does Sagan qualify as a statistician? - Glen_b
(2) Wikipedia appears to credit Martin Rees... who's also not a statistician. - Glen_b
(2) @Glen_b It appears that Sagan might have said that in some sense of irony, if it all, being a critic of Martin's quote. That's something to contemplate, for me, since cosmology is so full of examples where predictions have been made to account for inexplicable sources of error that have turned out to be correct (or not quite debunked), e.g. cosmic background radiation, dark matter, and the Big Bang Theory. - AdamO
(1) @John D. Cook "Because we've looked and haven't found any" makes sense to me, and I strongly agree with this rationale, but where do we fit the black swan like phenomena? - Robson
(1) What is sometimes lost on some is that apparent absence really is evidence of absence. - Galen
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[+64] [2010-08-09 01:44:41] John D. Cook

"It's easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them."

-- Frederick Mosteller


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[+59] [2010-11-07 22:41:34] whuber

Tout le monde y croit cependant, me disait un jour M. Lippmann, car les expérimentateurs s'imaginent que c'est un théorème de mathématiques, et les mathématiciens que c'est un fait expérimental.

Henri Poincaré, Calcul des probabilités (2nd ed., 1912), p. 171.

In English:

Everybody believes in the exponential law of errors [i.e., the Normal distribution]: the experimenters, because they think it can be proved by mathematics; and the mathematicians, because they believe it has been established by observation.

Whittaker, E. T. and Robinson, G. "Normal Frequency Distribution." Ch. 8 in The Calculus of Observations: A Treatise on Numerical Mathematics [1], 4th ed. New York: Dover, pp. 164-208, 1967. p. 179.

Quoted at Mathworld.com [2].

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=PlEjcAAACAAJ&dq=The+Calculus+of+Observations:+An+Introduction+to+Numerical+Analysis&hl=en&ei=5CrXTLPsMoGBlAfR2fH8CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA
[2] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalDistribution.html

(11) This is a rather free translation of a saying attributed to Gabriel Lippmann by Henri Poincar\'e in his Calcul des probabilit\'es (1896/1912). Original was in French, naturellement. Lippmann won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908. - Nick Cox
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[+58] [2010-07-27 07:38:19] Albort

Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable.

-Bobby Bragan, 1963


(9) Wrong: 200 C and 0 C average to about 100 C, which is the boiling point of water. Ovens only go down to about 150 C, and 75 C is still too hot. Now, if you have one foot in scalding water (about 55 C) and another in cold icy water... then you are probably a strange person. - alexfernandez
(1) @alexfernandez My oven begins at 50°C. It is a standard oven, and all ovens in the flats that I lived in began at this temperature. - user14650
@what I suppose that low-temperature cooking has brought down minimum temperatures, but I doubt that in 1963 this was the case. - alexfernandez
There's a similar Russian idiom that I'd translate as "The average patient temperature in the hospital is normal". - Eduard Gelman
"You cannot wade through a river which is on average 4 feet deep" - Nassim Taleb - dain
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[+56] [2010-07-27 09:44:12] Jeromy Anglim

I don't know about famous, but the following is one of my favourites:

Conducting data analysis is like drinking a fine wine. It is important to swirl and sniff the wine, to unpack the complex bouquet and to appreciate the experience. Gulping the wine doesn’t work.

-Daniel B. Wright (2003), see PDF of Article [1].

Reference: Wright, D. B. (2003). Making friends with your data: Improving how statistics are conducted and reported1. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 73(1), 123-136.

[1] http://www.baomee.info/pdf/MakeFriends/1.pdf

Like it, though it does remind me of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Toni - onestop
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[+56] [2010-08-09 15:36:26] robin girard

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Claude Elwood Shannon


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[+54] [2010-07-27 14:03:52] Henrik

... surely, God loves the .06 nearly as much as the .05. Can there be any doubt that God views the strength of evidence for or against the null as a fairly continuous function of the magnitude of p? (p.1277)

Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R. (1989). Statistical procedures and the justification of knowledge in psychological science. American Psychologist, 44(10), 1276-1284. pdf [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140330070045/http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Emaccoun/PP279_Rosnow.pdf

I would love to take this one as my accepted answer ! too good to be true ! - robin girard
Anyway, I can give a citation of Lehman about that: "There is some convenience in such standardization since it permits a reduction in certain tables needed for carrying out various tests". - robin girard
Rosnow & Rosenthal's is a very useful, eye-opening quote that is almost correct. - rolando2
(1) @rolando2: please expand. What's not correct about it? - naught101
@naught101 - At this point I can't think of anything :-) - rolando2
I'm not sure I got this one. Probably I didn't get it... - An old man in the sea.
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[+50] [2010-11-08 16:06:40] Frank Zafka

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage


(5) +1 A breathtaking harbinger of the follies of the coming century; "GIGO before its time." - whuber
(1) This makes me think of one of the most fundamental mathematical equations: $\text{crap}=\text{crap}$ - probabilityislogic
(3) Are you kidding? Isn't this what economics is all about? - naught101
(1) if I type "stick axchange crss vlidated" into Google, it brings me here! - Neil McGuigan
(2) I've had occasion to use Babbage's wonderful second sentence in a wider range of situations than this. - Glen_b
Agreed, but Babbage surely knew about iterative procedures that improve on an initial guess and converge to the right answer. - Nick Cox
I've never heard this one before, but it has jumped to my top 2 or 3 immediately. - Jared Becksfort
27
[+49] [2010-07-27 06:26:04] robin girard

All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different---in some decimal place---for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

Tukey (again but this one is my favorite)


(1) It has actually led to very interesting articles... :) - Tal Galili
@Tal: Fully agree! I think the whole area on optimal separation in minimax testing is starting from this idea ... and it is still so confused for a lot of statistician. For those interested see the paper of donoho projecteuclid.org/… (and the references in the paper ! since things are much older than donoho's paper) - robin girard
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[+47] [2010-07-27 15:05:38] ramhiser

The subjectivist (i.e. Bayesian) states his judgements, whereas the objectivist sweeps them under the carpet by calling assumptions knowledge, and he basks in the glorious objectivity of science.

I.J. Good


oh the bayesian is soooo Good... - robin girard
I love this one. It is great ! - steffen
Why are Bayesian always equated with subjectivist? -- What about E.T.Jaynes and the other 'objective Bayesians'? What about all subjectivity within the 'objectivist' frequentism? - gwr
(2) @gwr Well 'objectivity' is a social construct that is subjectively evaluated as an experience, so calling Bayesians out on subjectivity is less meritless because untrue, and more meritless because more or less everyone is subjectivist. ;) - Alexis
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[+44] [2010-08-16 05:45:29] ymihere

Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.

-- Winston Churchill


(6) This quote seems to be known only in Germany and there is doubt that it is authentic, see the link below where the State Office of Statistics in Baden-Württemberg show results of their research about this quote (sorry its only available in German). The Times, e.g., said that they never heard about it. statistik.baden-wuerttemberg.de/Veroeffentl/Monatshefte/… - psj
(5) The alternative form is "I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself" sometimes claimed to have been put into Churchill's mouth by Goebbels during a propaganda dispute over wartime losses. - Henry
I admit that I did not investigate about the quote's origin. However, the core of the statement remains true. Statistics, especially in mass media, are never presented with the necessary information to estimate their validity or correctness. - ymihere
(2) Does Churchill qualify as a statistician? - Glen_b
(3) @Glen_b If he ever faked some data, then sure! - Darren Cook
This is almost too good to be false... Surely if it were intended sincerely, that'd be the most transparent propaganda ever? I guess war might make any kind of stupidity more believable, as long as it's the other side's stupidity. - naught101
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[+40] [2010-08-08 04:15:18] Robby McKilliam

This is unlikely to be a popular quote, but anyway,

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford


I think it is really popular.... but not it statistic (we don't want to loose our job because physisics are improving their experiment :) ). Anyway I think Rutherford belongs to this class of spiritual scientist... +1 - robin girard
All physical experiments I have ever seen have a standard deviation attached to it in some form (most commonly a +/- range). So he must have been joking. - KalEl
Unfortunately it is popular among those that don't understand or trust statistics. Once had it quoted to me when I gave a scientist an estimate of the number of hours it would take me to design and analyze his experiment. He didn't seem to appreciate the fact that noise can look like effects, and effects of interest can be hidden from intuition by noise. - Kingsford Jones
(8) I think this quote means that the results of the experiment should be "obvious", and statistics just lets one put a precise figure as to "just how obvious". The word needs is the key. - probabilityislogic
(2) I thought this was the tagline for Mythbusters... - JMS
(2) I really like this quote, for me it is clear that it is not a joke (@KalEl). This recalls that most often it is not the data that talks but the experiment, standard deviations are here to confirm that your experiment is talking loud. - robin girard
(1) It really says experimental design is the most important branch of statistics to experimental science. - Clark
31
[+37] [2010-07-31 05:49:03] Jeromy Anglim

"Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten."

- Terry Pratchett [1]

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/95458-scientists-have-calculated-that-the-chances-of-something-so-patently

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[+37] [2010-08-06 11:11:00] Roland Kofler

Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.

-- Brad Efron


Do you think that by "those" he means "everyone" ? what was the context of this citation ? it seems a bit strong like this :) - robin girard
(8) I would go one step further, within statistics. Those who ignore Bayesian statistics are condemned to reinvent it. - probabilityislogic
If anybody is looking for a source of this statement, it's attributed to Efron in this article (without source there though): doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-5823.2001.tb00474.x - Phil
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[+35] [2010-07-27 09:20:27] jilles de wit

Figures don't lie, but liars do figure

--Mark Twain


(2) I don't get what is so deep in that one, is it only playing with words ? - robin girard
I like to think of it as the statisticians equivalent of "guns don't kill people, people kill people" not very deep, but important to realise from time to time - jilles de wit
So it's an inane platitude used for quibbling over semantics? "Cigarettes don't cause cancer; people cause cancer." "Landmines don't maim people; people maim people." - Lèse majesté
(4) well... there is a fine line between inane platitude and profound wisdom. I like the quote for it's poetic quality. Any insight is of secondary importance to me. - jilles de wit
(1) Does Twain qualify as a statistician? - Glen_b
34
[+35] [2011-03-17 10:53:40] steffen

The plural of anecdote is not data.

-- Roger Brinner

(in the context of Anecdotal_evidence [1])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

(7) Surely it is, as long as the anecdotes aren't sampled with bias? - naught101
(1) @naught101 Please provide an example? - Jase
(3) @Jase: an anecdote is a chunk of information that is true, but may not be representative of the truth (i.e. it's biased toward the point that the story teller is trying to make). But that doesn't say anything about multiple anecdotes. If you could show that the biases in each anecdote in a set were independent, then they would probably cancel to some extent, allowing reliable analysis. Of course, this is a stupidly inefficient way of collecting data, and because it would be so difficult, there are no examples, because no-one has ever done it. And I was mostly just being a smart arse :D - naught101
(4) I would think that anecdotes are fundamentally biased: They caught the attention of someone, and caused emotions that made him remember it. There is no way human attention can be statistically independent, I assume. - Volker Siegel
35
[+32] [2010-09-11 15:18:26] Kingsford Jones

…the statistician knows…that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world.

George Box (JASA, 1976, Vol. 71, 791-799)


36
[+32] [2011-05-27 08:11:49] Neil McGuigan

"The first time I was in a statistics course, I was there to teach it"

John Tukey ( link [1])

[1] http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~brill/Papers/life.pdf

(3) He's not the only one--and that's not necessarily a good thing. - whuber
(10) Haha, true. Tukey gets a pass though! - Neil McGuigan
37
[+31] [2010-07-27 14:14:10] pramodc84

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

-- Kurt Tucholsky, in: Französischer Witz, 1925


(8) According to Wikiquote it is misattributed to Joseph Stalin; the origin is Kurt Tucholsky: en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Misattributed - Peter Mortensen
Here is the (so far much more likely) source: Französischer Witz by Kurt Tucholsky dating back to 1925: »Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!« (German original) - gwr
38
[+31] [2010-08-06 01:20:36] Thylacoleo

"It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without statistics." - Andrejs Dunkels


The best antidote to "...lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Thylacoleo
depending on what you call 'the thruth'... I don't think I give so much value to statistical truth :) - robin girard
I think it's a great one (I think it goes well with - "no models are true, some are useful") - Tal Galili
39
[+31] [2011-08-09 12:43:15] user603

"To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.”

Box, Hunter, and Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters (1978).


(7) Tell that to the theoretical physics community... - naught101
40
[+27] [2010-07-29 10:50:53] Graham Cookson

I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I'm not kidding.

Hal Varian [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Varian

I guess Val Harian is not a statistician if he is not kidding... what is a sexy job ? for me it is like the sitation with the sword of the century... fun but a bit trivial :) - robin girard
(2) This needs to be corrected. It was Hal Varian that said it. nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html - vqv
(4) in what year did he write this? - Leo Schalkwyk
(3) @Leo: He didn't write it; he said it (at the link provided by vqv). It was only a couple of years ago, so, you still have time. ;-) - cardinal
41
[+27] [2010-09-11 13:50:33] Andre Holzner

We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

Rutherford D. Roger


42
[+26] [2011-11-04 13:18:01] chl

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

-- John Tukey


43
[+25] [2010-07-27 14:10:31] Dave Kellen

The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the process he applies or recommends.

-– Sir Ronald A. Fisher


(1) I cannot believe this does not have ten times the upvotes! As an epidemiologist with a good (as far as people tell me...) grasp of statistics, I believe that's my most important "asset": understanding both the epidemiological question and the statistical technique, and matching those correctly to each other... - Theodore Lytras
44
[+23] [2013-02-03 14:44:05] Dilip Sarwate

"The Central Limit Theorem is about the journey and the Strong Law of Large Numbers is about the destination." stats.SE user cardinal in a comment on this question [1]

[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/q/49123/6633

45
[+23] [2013-06-27 19:58:06] sk8asd123

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.

xkcd [1]

[1] http://xkcd.com/552/

46
[+22] [2010-07-27 09:16:48] jilles de wit

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

-- probably: Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911). [1]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

(20) I hate this quote. It makes professions using statistics look like you could cheat. But, when someone profoundly uses statistics one knows that actually you cannot cheat. Because when provided with enough information about the statistical procedures used, one can draw a conclusion on the soundness of the procedures/results. If not enough information on the statistical (and other) procedures are provided, you should immediately question the results. - Henrik
(5) That would be true if everyone were knowledgeable enough in statistics to drive the correct conclusions. Alas, that quote is very applicable to many of those amusing human beings called politicians... - nico
(4) Whoever said this had no basic understanding of Statistics, or he was joking. - KalEl
(11) I think this quote is more of a cynical but realistic view of how statistical data is mostly used in debates (i.e. selected to support a preconceived notion rather than produced to test a hypothesis) - jilles de wit
(7) There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and fake statistics. - Joris Meys
(1) @JorisMeys: Or real, accurate, and precise statistics taken out of context... - naught101
47
[+22] [2011-09-01 05:04:48] Alex

60% of the time, it works every time.

-Brian Fantana


(2) for the uninitiated: youtube.com/watch?v=zLq2-uZd5LY - Neil McGuigan
48
[+21] [2010-08-06 11:15:17] Roland Kofler

My thesis is simply this: probability does not exist. - Bruno de Finetti


49
[+21] [2010-12-21 15:48:06] chl

The primary product of a research inquiry is one or more measures of effect size, not p values.

Cohen, J. (1990). Things I have learned (so far) [1]. American Psychologist, 45, 1304-1312.

[1] http://www.cps.nova.edu/marker/whatIhavelearnedsofarcohen.pdf

50
[+19] [2010-08-02 08:58:27] Random

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.

Arthur Conan Doyle


Clearly this person doesn't quite grasp the power of combinatorial calculations. Normal distributions appear because they are easy to realise. - probabilityislogic
51
[+19] [2010-08-06 05:15:22] Thylacoleo

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence."

Often attributed to Carl Sagan, but he was paraphrasing sceptic Marcello Truzzi. Doubtless the concept is even more ancient.

David Hume said, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence".

One could argue this is not a quote about statistics. However, applied statistics is ultimately in the business of evaluating the quality of evidence for or against some proposition.


52
[+19] [2010-08-22 00:34:17] Neil McGuigan

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Mark Twain (okay, so he's not a statistician)


(1) Google finds 12.3 million hits for this quotation. After running down the first eight pages of them, I haven't found a single site that actually gives a source--they all seem to be quoting each other rather than Mr. Twain. Does anyone know where he wrote this? Or maybe it's apocryphal. - whuber
(2) Heh, it was also used in the beginning of "The Big Short": imdb.com/title/tt1596363 ( filmcomment.com/blog/deep-focus-the-big-short ) - Konstantinos
I am almost sure that this is from "Huckleberry Finn." Ain't it? - Ulisses Braga-Neto
Late to the party here, but see this link: quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble - Phil
53
[+19] [2011-09-01 03:05:59] Fomite

This one is brand new, and Allen Wilcox is an epidemiologist, not a statistician, but whatever, I'm running with it.

Data do not speak for themselves - they need context, and they need skeptical evaluation


(5) I am upvoting this because a minor variation is so apt for our site: "Your data/output/code/formula do not speak for themselves: they need context and they need sceptical evaluation." - whuber
54
[+19] [2012-02-06 19:18:52] gung - Reinstate Monica

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

-Albert Einstein

I acknowledge that Einstein wasn't a statistician. However, Michael Friendly uses this quote in arguing for a greater role for visualizations in data analysis. I share that goal, and I think the quote works nicely.


(2) +1 That's a nice one. The funny thing is this, sometimes people can picture it (make or see a plot of something) and still not understand it. :) - Graeme Walsh
55
[+19] [2016-03-22 20:05:17] Vishal

Without data you're just another person with an opinion. -- W. Edwards Deming

enter image description here


Is there a source available for this quote? I've seen it being quoted on the net, but I have not found a source for where Deming would have said or written this. - Phil
56
[+18] [2010-07-29 11:25:13] Roman Luštrik

An ecologist is a statistician who likes to be outside.

-- apparently a good friend of Murray Cooper [1].

[1] http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Why-software-fails-in-scientific-research-td1573062.html#a2275423

57
[+18] [2014-09-11 13:38:34] user55609

This is my favourite:

"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”

by Ashleigh Brilliant


58
[+17] [2010-09-11 10:29:14] chl

May I add this one, because I like Jan's contributions to psychometrics and statistics...

Causal interpretation of the results of regression analysis of observational data is a risky business. The responsibility rests entirely on the shoulders of the researcher, because the shoulders of the statistical technique cannot carry such strong inferences.

Jan de Leeuw, homepage [1]

[1] http://gifi.stat.ucla.edu/

59
[+17] [2011-05-27 18:19:55] Peter Flom

The Earth is round. p < .05

Jacob Cohen


(8) The earth is an oblate spheroid. So I guess that depends on what degree of accuracy you care about.. - naught101
60
[+17] [2011-05-27 18:21:27] Peter Flom

When I see articles with lots of significance tests, I say that the statisticians are p-ing on the research.

Herman Friedmann (by recollection, he said this in class)


Who's Hermann Friedmann? I've tried searching for him, but couldn't find anything... - An old man in the sea.
61
[+17] [2012-07-26 15:51:08] steffen

Found in Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation [1] by Peter Norvig

Most of the time, when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you have screwed up the experiment

(Michael Wigler)

in the sense of

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

(Carl Sagan)

which is based on a similar quote by Pierre Laplace

[1] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

62
[+16] [2010-11-08 15:05:19] steffen

It would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable

~ Spock, "The Enterprise Incident",stardata 5027.3


(3) I appreciate that the citation comes with the stardate. - gung - Reinstate Monica
63
[+16] [2011-01-28 18:01:15] probabilityislogic

I just can't help myself, this is a provocative quote from E. T. Jaynes:

Many of us have already explored the road you are following, and we know what you will find at the end of it. It doesn't matter how many new words you drag into the discussion to avoid having to utter the word 'probability' in a sense different from frequency: likelihood, confidence, significance, propensity, support, credibility, acceptability, indifference, consonance, tenability; and so on, until the resources of the good Dr Roget are exhausted. All of these are attempts to represent degrees of plausibility by real numbers, and they are covered automatically by Cox's theorems. It doesn't matter which approach you happen to like philosophically; by the time you have made your methods fully consistent, you will be forced, kicking and screaming, back to the ones given by Laplace. Until you have achieved mathematical equivalence with Laplace's methods, it will be possible, by looking in specific problems with Galileo's magnification, to exhibit the defects in your methods.


64
[+16] [2012-07-22 19:19:55] user603

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

--Tukey


(1) This quote is great because it highlights the importance of graphical summary compared to only using numerical summary. - Nuclear241
65
[+15] [2010-07-27 16:18:28] Michael Bishop

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

George Bernard Shaw


is it ? then we are all intelligent persons here:) - robin girard
66
[+15] [2010-12-08 15:13:53] matcheek

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. ~Gregg Easterbrook


(2) This is practically identical to stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/… but has been attributed to a different person! Who's right? - whuber
(3) Google searches suggest, by 20 to 1, that Easterbrook originated this quotation, but he didn't really start writing until after Coase was quoted in print. The best evidence I can find concerning this (and it's still not very good) is Coase's Wikipedia page, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase . - whuber
67
[+15] [2011-01-06 14:22:03] chl

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

-- Von Neumann


(3) Talk to the hand, cause the quasi-random sequence ain't listening. - naught101
68
[+15] [2013-03-26 18:32:02] D L Dahly

"...a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data."

E.T. Jaynes


69
[+14] [2011-06-01 17:43:40] David LeBauer

preamble: There is even a class of user now days who sees the significance stars rather like the gold stars my grandson sometimes gets on his homework:

Three solid gold (significance) stars on the main effects will do very nicely, thank you, and if there are a few little stars here and there on the interactions, so much the better!

W.N. Venables

Exegeses on Linear Models [1]

[1] http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS3/Exegeses.pdf

Surely that's highly context-dependent? - naught101
(3) @naught it is sarcastic - David LeBauer
Heh. Fair enough. That probably also needs more context :P - naught101
@naught101 done. - David LeBauer
70
[+14] [2013-04-27 15:58:23] ArturoSaCo

"Taking a model too seriously is really just another way of not taking it seriously at all."

By Andrew Gelman


71
[+14] [2014-07-17 12:15:15] Momo

"Statistics is exciting because you get to play with others' data while telling them their research is crap."

Stephen J. Senn ( Source [1])

[1] https://twitter.com/stephensenn/status/489741383096631297

72
[+13] [2012-04-24 03:43:25] Pavo

Everybody is a Bayesian. It's just that some know it, and some don't. - Trivellore Raghunathan


73
[+13] [2012-05-18 16:56:12] whuber

Don't think -- use the computer.

Attributed ("tongue in cheek," just to make sure we understand the intent) to "G. Dyke." Quoted in Phillip I. Good and James W. Hardin, Common Errors in Statistics [1]: see the very first page of Part I.


A "G. Dyke" is cited in the bibliography as the author of How to avoid bad statistics. Field Crops Res. 1997; 51: 165-197. This apparently is George Dyke, who later in the book is quoted more at length:

The availability of 'user-friendly' statistical software has caused authors to become increasingly careless about the logic of interpreting their results, and to rely uncritically on computer output, often using the 'default option' when something a little different (usually, but not always, a little more complicated) is correct, or at least more appropriate.

[Cited on pp 71-72 in the first edition, 2003.]

A related quotation graces the beginning of Chapter 7:

Cut out the appropriate part of the computer output and paste it onto the draft of the paper.

[1] http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/17/04717943/0471794317.pdf

+1 These are very good. Thanks for sharing the references too. Will definitely look them up. Very useful! - Graeme Walsh
74
[+12] [2010-07-27 17:57:48] Baltimark

Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai. [1]

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/from-height-of-this-place.html

aligatou gozaimasu - robin girard
I would say data is the bullet, Statistics is the gun. - KalEl
75
[+12] [2010-08-06 00:29:25] Wesley Burr

"If you think that statistics has nothing to say about what you do or how you could do it better, then you are either wrong or in need of a more interesting job." - Stephen Senn (Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health, Cambridge University Press, 2003)


76
[+12] [2010-08-06 01:29:56] Thylacoleo

"New methods always look better than old ones. Neural nets are better than logistic regression, support vector machines are better than neural nets, etc." - Brad Efron


(4) shame they often only look better... :-( - Dikran Marsupial
Yeah, the first part of that quote is saying a different thing to the second part ("look" vs. "are"). - naught101
They also bring in new clients, which then has to be converted to the good old methods ... - kjetil b halvorsen
77
[+12] [2010-08-06 01:43:46] Thylacoleo

In the long run, we're all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes.

A reference to survival analysis?!


Isn't this an "economist" joke? Saying that the economist Jargon of "the long run" we never actually get to "the long run" - probabilityislogic
78
[+12] [2010-09-11 10:26:16] chl

At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning.

Edward Tufte, www.edwardtufte.com [1]

[1] http://www.edwardtufte.com

Edward Tufte is a statistician. Started his career with BA and MS in statistics from Stanford, taught and wrote books about statistics for political scientists and is a fellow of the ASA. - Kingsford Jones
@Kingsford My fault! I was initially thinking of another citation, not from Tufte and didn't remove my first words... I UPDATED my response. Many thanks! - chl
79
[+12] [2010-11-08 14:12:20] whuber

"After 17 years of interacting with physicians, I have come to realize that many of them are adherents of a religion they call Statistics... Like any good religion, it involves vague mysteries capable of contradictory and irrational interpretation. It has a priesthood and a class of mendicant friars. And it provides Salvation: Proper invocation of the religious dogmas of Statistics will result in publication in prestigious journals."

David S. Salsburg [1] (author of The Lady Tasting Tea), quoted at " Pithypedia [2]".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Salsburg
[2] http://www.pithypedia.com/?author=David+S.+Salsburg

80
[+12] [2011-01-18 22:11:11] probabilityislogic

One sees, from this Essay, that the theory of probabilities is basically just common sense reduced to calculus; it makes one appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it.

Another one from Laplace


(1) Laplace never took measure theory from a statistics professor ;) - JMS
@JMS - measure theory not as good as complex analysis perhaps? Laplace was quite good at this I think. Perhaps statistics from analysis perspective has more "common sense" about it than measure theory ;). - probabilityislogic
calculus: if I recall correctly, the French original is "calcul", more accurately translated as "calculation" - Nick Cox
81
[+12] [2012-03-28 23:53:12] naught101

With three constants, I can fit a dog. With four, I can make it bark.

Attributed to William Reifsnyder [1], in a personal communication to me. Unfortunately I can't find a reference on the 'web.

[1] http://bill.reifsnyder.net/

(17) "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk" is a quote by von Neumann. - mark999
82
[+12] [2012-11-20 17:15:17] StatisticsDoc Consulting

Statistics is the grammar of science - Karl Pearson


I would love a source for this quote. I know he wrote a book called "The Grammar of Science" and that he was a statistician, but that does not mean that "Statistics is the grammar of science" is a quote by him. - Phil
83
[+11] [2010-08-01 14:21:18] Darren Wilkinson

The true logic of this world is in the calculus of probabilities.

-- James Clerk Maxwell


84
[+11] [2010-08-04 18:29:57] Seth

All information looks like noise until you break the code.

Hiro in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)


(2) (+1) It's an interesting quotation, not least for being so obviously incorrect. - whuber
85
[+11] [2010-09-10 23:05:50] Carlos Accioly

There is no free hunch.

-- Robert Abelson


there is if you are below your "production frontier"... ;P - probabilityislogic
86
[+11] [2011-08-06 17:52:35] Johannes

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

Not quite from a statistician, but I nonetheless like to quote this one in lectures. It nicely sums up what we as data analysts do.


87
[+11] [2012-03-28 23:57:13] Zen

"What the use of a p-value implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred."

Harold Jeffreys (Theory of Probability)


I don't get it: how can a result be both "observable" and "not occurred"? - nalzok
88
[+11] [2012-06-25 00:08:30] AnastD

The best time to plan an experiment is after you've done it.

by R.A. Fisher


89
[+11] [2013-06-27 23:53:37] Graeme Walsh

“There are two things you are better off not watching in the making: sausages and econometric estimates.” - Edward Leamer [1]

The quote comes from:

Leamer, Edward E, 1983. "Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics," [2] American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(1), pages 31-43, March.

And he also says it, in spoken word, on this EconTalk podcast [3] hosted by Russ Roberts.

[1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/edward.leamer/
[2] http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v73y1983i1p31-43.html
[3] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/05/leamer_on_the_s.html

at least with a sausage, I know that I like the finished product.... - probabilityislogic
@probabilityislogic haha Very good! - Graeme Walsh
90
[+11] [2013-06-30 03:09:12] Glen

"When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math. If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics." - Karl Broman


This isn't a quote about statistics. It's a quote about linguistic pedantry. - naught101
(3) Hmmmmmm, linguistic pedantry? Sure... But still about statistics. - Glen
91
[+10] [2010-07-27 08:43:15] John D. Cook

efficiency = statistical efficiency x usage.

-- John Tukey


92
[+10] [2010-07-27 16:04:42] Alan Scrivner

A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions.

-- M.J. Moroney


Thanks. Had the opportunity to work with a great statistician for a while and was always amazed by how much information he could get out of the least amount of data by asking very pointed questions. This quotation so reminds me of hm - Alan Scrivner
Nice quote, though I can't help imagine how it would sound being spoken by Chris Eubank... - onestop
93
[+10] [2010-08-01 14:25:28] Darren Wilkinson

A bit obscure this one, but a great quote about subjective probability:

... There is no way, however, in which the individual can avoid the burden of responsibility for his own evaluations. The key cannot be found that will unlock the enchanted garden wherein, among the fairy-rings and the shrubs of magic wands, beneath the trees laden with monads and noumena, blossom forth the flowers of probabilitas realis. With these fabulous blooms safely in our button-holes we would be spared the necessity of forming opinions, and the heavy loads we bear upon our necks would be rendered superflous once and for all.

Bruno de Finetti, Theory of Probability, Vol 2


94
[+10] [2010-08-17 16:17:00] pmgjones

A man who ‘rejects’ a hypothesis provisionally, as a matter of habitual practice, when the significance is at the 1% level or higher, will certainly be mistaken in not more than 1% of such decisions. For when the hypothesis is correct he will be mistaken in just 1% of these cases, and when it is incorrect he will never be mistaken in rejection. [...] However, the calculation is absurdly academic, for in fact no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects hypotheses; he rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his evidence and his ideas.

-- Sir Ronald A. Fisher, from Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference (1956)

Another quote as a commentary: "This passage clearly is intended as a criticism of Neyman and Pearson, although again their names are not mentioned. However, these authors never recommended a fixed level of significance that would be used in all cases. [...] Thus Fisher rather incongruously appears to be attacking his own past position rather than that of Neyman and Pearson" (from Fisher, Neyman, and the Creation of Classical Statistics by Erich Lehmann, section 4.5).


95
[+10] [2010-08-23 14:14:57] Elgin Perry

'Figures fool when fools figure'.

Henry Oliver Lancaster


96
[+10] [2015-12-05 19:14:30] tho_mi

"A frequentist is a person whose long-run ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time."

Unknown.


Why does this frequentist exclusively look at null hypotheses? :) - Cliff AB
"A frequentist is a person whose..." that's an old fiction. There are no frequentists and Bayesians as if this is a characteristic of a person like a nationality or religion. Maybe you could still compare it to something like jobs, like somebody who paints is a painter and somebody who works with electricity is an electrician. However, I would like somebody who does statistics to be a statistician and not a Bayesian or frequentist. - Sextus Empiricus
97
[+10] [2016-01-28 20:41:31] Ruggero Turra

Bayesians address the question everyone is interested in by using assumptions no-one believes, while frequentists use impeccable logic to deal with an issue of no interest to anyone

Louis Lyons


98
[+9] [2010-07-27 16:26:53] Michael Bishop

These days the statistician is often asked such questions as "Are you a Bayesian?" "Are you a frequentist?" "Are you a data analyst?" "Are you a designer of experiments?". I will argue that the appropriate answer to ALL of these questions can be (and preferably should be) "yes", and that we can see why this is so if we consider the scientific context for what statisticians do.

--G.E.P. Box


99
[+9] [2010-08-05 19:41:53] Brandon Bertelsen

9 out of ten dentists think the 10th dentist is an idiot.

  • No idea who said it.

(2) Similar to 80% of car drivers think they're "above average". - probabilityislogic
"9 out of 10 persons like chocolate. 1 is lying." - cbeleites unhappy with SX
100
[+9] [2010-08-15 18:36:58] Charles Berry

To understand God's Thoughts we must study statistics for these are the measure of His purpose.

--Florence Nightingale


Only problem is that god itself either eludes statistical reasoning or is statistically very unlikely to exist. - Momo
101
[+9] [2010-09-11 15:27:50] Kingsford Jones

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

George Box


102
[+9] [2011-01-28 20:23:49] Did

[Statistics are] the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the science of man.

-- Sir Francis Galton [1]

[1] http://galton.org/

103
[+9] [2011-09-01 13:57:47] hsigrist

The probability is like the stick used by the blind man to feel his way. If he could see, he would not need the cane, just as if we knew which horse runs faster, then we would not need probability theory.

Stanislaw Lem


104
[+9] [2011-11-23 18:21:02] Xavier Labouze

The roll of the dice will never abolish chance

Written in 1897 by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) , a famous French poet - In French :

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard


105
[+9] [2012-07-17 12:44:21] Tal Galili

Context: An F-test is often a poor way to justify pooling, because F-test is not robust against non-normality.

"To make a preliminary test on variances is rather like putting to sea in a rowing boat to find out whether conditions are sufficiently calm for an ocean liner to leave port." (G.E.P. Box, "Non-normality and tests on variances",

Source: Biometrika, 40 (1953), pp 318-335, quote on page 333; via from Moore & McCabe.

(props to Tim Hesterberg: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-February/154856.html)


106
[+9] [2013-01-30 03:34:52] rolando2

People think that if you collect enormous amounts of data you are bound to get the right answer. You are not bound to get the right answer unless you are enormously smart. Bradley Efron


107
[+9] [2015-08-04 14:38:57] Ho1

1

Uncertainty is a personal matter; it is not the uncertainty but your uncertainty. (Dennis Lindley)

Reference: Dennis Victor Lindley [1] (2006), Understanding Uncertainty, Wiley-Interscience, p. 1.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dennis_Lindley

The picture is of John Nelder, not Dennis Lindley. - Nick Cox
@NickCox You're right! Here's the origianl Lindley: statisticsviews.com/details/feature/5060491/… - Ho1
To play on the usual joke about cosmologists, theologians, economists, etc., Lindley appears not to have acted on his own maxim. He was certain that almost other statisticians were wrong. - Nick Cox
@NickCox So, is certainty also personal? :-) - Ho1
I'm certain of it. - Nick Cox
108
[+8] [2011-05-27 15:30:01] Tal Galili

"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may be cast." - Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

Found here [1].

[1] http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/

-1 not really stats specific... - naught101
109
[+8] [2012-03-16 00:26:15] Macro

A quote from Karl Pearson:

The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material

I think of statistics as, essentially, the methodology of science, so that's how I interpret this quote.


110
[+8] [2013-01-29 16:44:27] arash

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." albert einstein


111
[+7] [2010-07-29 15:43:35] Christian

You may be too vague to be wrong and that's really bad cause that's just obscuring the issue.

Bruce Sterling


(2) Also a favorite topic of Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine. "That's not even wrong." - rolando2
"Not even wrong" is often mentioned as a standard put-down of the acerbic (but very smart) physicist Wolfgang Pauli. - Nick Cox
112
[+7] [2010-08-13 16:11:20] Dikran Marsupial

"I cannot conceal the fact here that in the [application of probability theory], I foresee many things happening which can cause one to be badly mistaken if he does not proceed cautiously.",

Bernoulli (1713) (via ET Jaynes)

"A statistician is someone who knows what to assume to be Gaussian"

Dikran Marsupial (2009) (not famous yet ;o).


Do we vote for the first one or the second one :) ? - robin girard
first one, I'm not famous... yet ;o) BTW, the second one is intended as a complement, just in case there was any doubt. - Dikran Marsupial
113
[+7] [2011-01-28 19:20:55] Did

Everybody knows that probability and statistics are the same thing, and statistics is nothing but correlation. Now the correlation is just the cosine of an angle, thus all is trivial.

-- Emil Artin, according to Kai Lai Chung in Elementary probability theory [1] (right, Artin might not been known primarily as a statistician)

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=safNnEOICL8C

114
[+7] [2011-03-17 12:05:58] rolando2

The researcher armed with a confidence interval, but deprived of the false respectability of statistical significance, must work harder to convince himself and others of the importance of his findings. This can only be good.

Michael Oakes, Statistical inference: A commentary for the social and behavioural sciences (NY: Wiley, 1986)


115
[+7] [2016-01-28 21:18:42] StatsStudent

"The statistician cannot evade the responsibility for understanding the processes he applies or recommends." -- Sir Ronald A. Fisher in The Design of Experiments (1935)


True, but the data scientist can. Understanding? We don't need no stinking understanding. - Mark L. Stone
Without understanding, no real progress can be made. - StatsStudent
(1) Duplicate of an answer above. - user46481
116
[+6] [2010-07-27 09:25:00] robin girard

The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal thruths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of physical universe

-- Karl Pearson


I guess I should remove it... poor Karl Pearson, one of the inventor of hypothesis testing not understood by the 21st century ... I would vote up if I could, but it's me that put it here :) - robin girard
117
[+6] [2010-07-27 14:20:42] pramodc84

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

~ Hillaire Belloc in The Silence of the Sea


Hillaire Belloc? Nice work on digging that up. - Shane
118
[+6] [2010-09-11 15:37:55] Kingsford Jones

We statisticians, as a police of science (a label some dislike but I am proud of...), have the fundamental duty of helping others to engage in statistical thinking as a necessary step of scientific inquiry and evidence-based policy formulation. In order to truly fulfill this task, we must constantly firm up and deepen our own foundation, and resist the temptation of competing for “methods and results” without pondering deeply whether we are helping others or actually harming them by effectively encouraging more false discoveries or misguided policies. Otherwise, we indeed can lose our identity, no matter how much we are desired or feared now.

Xiao-Li Meng


nice quote - and you can see the inherent "pessimism" in stats folk, for she speaks of "false discoveries" and not of "missed discoveries" (which are just as important). - probabilityislogic
119
[+6] [2010-12-03 21:05:59] Allan Engelhardt

“Statistics is much like a streetlight. Not very enlightening, but nice for supporting you”

Storm P [1]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robert_Storm_Petersen#Quotes

(4) Wasn't this based on an older variation? - Tal Galili
120
[+6] [2011-01-18 21:34:07] probabilityislogic

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Also known as Laplace's demon


In French : philia.online.fr/txt/lapl_001.php - Jean Marie Becker
121
[+6] [2011-05-28 13:02:46] rolando2

Statistics' real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical.

Steve Vardeman and Max Morris


I wonder what he meant by that... - Tal Galili
Some possible interpretations...1. Thru statistics we teach the importance of empirical testing 2. Thru statistics we teach the importance of assessing the degree of uncertainty inherent in a topic 3. Through statistics we teach the importance of looking for confounding variables, or more generally of expanding our scope as we try to identify causal relationships. Do you have more ideas? - rolando2
I would assume the meaning is that statistics and science are fundamentally about removing your own biases from your assessment of the world, and that such a noble goal could just as well be applied to moral debates. - naught101
My take on meaning: The search for the truth, and that anyone/everyone could be wrong about it. - probabilityislogic
122
[+6] [2012-03-28 10:08:10] naught101

Good statistics involves principled argument that conveys an interesting and credible point.

-- Robert P. Abelson, (1995) "Statistics as Principled Argument"

We left in our mathematical model a gap for the exercise of a more intuitive process of personal judgement

-- Egon Pearson, quoted in Abelson (1995).


123
[+6] [2012-06-20 14:14:15] Zen

"One death is a tragedy, 100,000 deaths are statistics."

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi


124
[+6] [2014-08-04 15:10:53] rapaio

"If you put a buttock on a hot plate and another one on an ice cube, the average is good, but in reality your bottom is in trouble."

Grigore Moisil [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigore_Moisil

125
[+6] [2015-11-13 05:59:57] Nevio Dubbini

Not really about statistics, but works perfectly:

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." (Henri Poincaré)


126
[+6] [2017-03-15 08:50:27] Yves

Not yet famous, but could become so.

"If a problem can not be tackled nonparametrically, it is dangerous to tackle it parametrically. But on the other hand, if it can be tackled nonparametrically, it would be better to tackle it parametrically." -- Sir David Cox

Statistics - past, present and future, Royal Statistical Society 180th Anniversary Lecture [1] near 16:27.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRik3vOKLcU

127
[+5] [2010-07-27 09:19:53] jilles de wit

The Median Isn't the Message

-- Stephen Jay Gould [1]

[1] http://cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html

+1 For those who have not read it, I highly recommend Gould's 1985 The Median Isn't the Message essay in Discover. - jthetzel
128
[+5] [2010-08-05 20:38:41] Roland Kofler

No statistican, but useful for the profession:

The perfect is the enemy of the good - Voltaire


129
[+5] [2010-08-13 16:04:08] whuber

CauseWeb [1] has a collection of statistics quotations. Many have already been repeated here, but it has plenty that haven't yet been quoted, such as

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."

(Falsely attributed to Sir Winston Churchill.) For the rest, follow the CauseWeb links to Resources->Fun->Quote.

[1] http://www.causeweb.org/

130
[+5] [2012-08-01 04:44:46] RioRaider

Check out " Statistician's Blues [1]" by Todd Snider who is an alternative-country singer-songwriter. Warning, if you are sensitive to "bad" words, don't listen to the song. If you have a good or perhaps twisted sense of humor you will enjoy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00

131
[+5] [2013-04-16 03:12:07] Zen

"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject. He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician".

(Sherlock Holmes speaking to Dr. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Sign of the Four")


132
[+5] [2013-04-23 21:25:56] dimitriy

A table without stars is like champagne without bubbles! - David Giles [1]

[1] http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2013/04/star-wars.html

133
[+5] [2014-02-06 18:52:46] omidi

Data analysis is simply a dialogue with the data

--Stephen F. Gull, 1994


134
[+5] [2016-01-28 17:28:33] Johan_A_M

Many folks know only enough statistics to be dangerous. From Statistics for Dummies II - Deborah Rumsey


135
[+4] [2010-08-03 20:07:57] Peter Flom

A variation on the Fisher quotation given here [1] is

Hiring a statistician after the data have been collected is like hiring a physician when your patient is in the morgue. He may be able to tell you what went wrong, but he is unlikely to be able to fix it.

But I heard this attributed to Box, not Fisher.

[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/726/famous-statistician-quotes/739#739

Edited to disambiguate 'above.' - Larry Wang
136
[+4] [2010-08-06 03:17:17] Steve Kass

Do not make things easy for yourself by speaking or thinking of data as if they were different from what they are; and do not go off from facing data as they are, to amuse your imagination by wishing they were different from what they are. Such wishing is pure waste of nerve force, weakens your intellectual power, and gets you into habits of mental confusion.

--Mary Everest Boole


137
[+4] [2010-08-17 08:29:54] nikie

It's not really about statistics, but I think it applies to statistics:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle


(5) @user956 - I would disagree with this. Neither theory nor experiment are "in charge" of the other - they work together. Sometimes the theory leads to an experiment, we have an untested hypothesis we want to confirm or deny with some data. - probabilityislogic
Some times data leads to an over fitted model, too. - naught101
138
[+4] [2017-12-13 05:44:07] eipi10

[T]he p-value is the probability of obtaining data at least as extreme as the ones observed, if the null hypothesis is true. This is a world apart from saying that it is the probability of the null hypothesis being true, given that you observed that extreme data! Beware! If your ability on the long jump puts you in the 99.99% percentile, that does not mean that you are a kangaroo, and neither can one infer that the probability that you belong to the human race is 0.01%. - Tomasso Dorigo [1]

[1] http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/fundamental_glossary_higgs_broadcast-85365

139
[+3] [2010-07-27 16:14:26] Michael Bishop

An argument over the meaning of words is a matter of law, an argument grounded in empirical data and quantitative estimates is an argument about science.

~ Razib Khan (though he is not a statistician or famous)


140
[+3] [2014-08-04 17:20:55] Andy

Perhaps not overly famous among statisticians but reduced-form econometricians will know it well:

If you can't see the causal relation of interest in the reduced form, it's probably not there.

Angrist and Krueger (2001) [1]

[1] http://economics.mit.edu/files/18

141
[+3] [2015-12-05 19:34:35] epsilone

Statistics without science is incomplete, science without statistics is imperfect.

K.V. Mardia


142
[+3] [2018-03-22 04:04:18] user3303

An intense preoccupation with the latest minutiae and indifference to the social and intellectual forces of tradition and revolutionary change, combine to produce the Mandarinism that some would now say already characterizes academic statistical theory and is most likely to describe its immediate future.

The statisticians of the past came into the subject from other fields - astronomy, pure mathematics, genetics, agronomy, economics etc. — and created their statistical methodology with a background of training for a specific scientific discipline and a feeling for its current needs. So for the future I recommend we work on interesting problems and avoid dogmatism.

-- Herbert Robbins in "Wither Mathematical Statistics?" as quoted by Peter J. Huber in "Speculations on the Path of Statistics".

Robbins, Herbert. "Wither Mathematical Statistics?" Advances in Applied Probability 7 (1975): 116-21. doi:10.2307/1426316.

Brillinger, D. R., L. T. Fernholz, and S. Morgenthaler, eds. The Practice of Data Analysis: Essays in Honor of John W. Tukey. Princeton University Press, 1997. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zthdd.


Wither? That's a harsh assessment of the future of mathematical statistics! - Dilip Sarwate
This was written in the spirit of Tukey's "Future of Data Analysis" and Peter Huber was invoking others like Robbins who have said similar things. - user3303
143
[+3] [2018-09-08 02:37:12] user3303

In his Fisher lecture, Box defines mathematistry as

the development of theory for theory's sake, which, since it seldom touches down with practice, has a tendency to redefine the problem rather than solve it. Typically, there has once been a statistical problem with scientific relevance but this has long since been lost sight of.

He also defines cookbookery as

The tendency to force all problems into the molds of one or two routine techniques, insufficient thought being given to the real objectives of the investigation or to the relevance of the assumptions implied by the imposed methods.

References

Box, G. E. P. 1976. Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71: 791–799.

Roderick J. Little (2013) In Praise of Simplicity not Mathematistry! Ten Simple Powerful Ideas for the Statistical Scientist, Journal of the American Statistical Association


144
[+2] [2010-07-27 14:25:39] pramodc84

A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.

~ Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839) ch. 2


(1) an enlightened customer said "try proving anything without them..." :) - probabilityislogic
@probabilityislogic "cogito ergo sum"? :P - naught101
145
[+2] [2010-08-06 11:23:15] PaulHurleyuk

...Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress.

--George Box 1992


146
[+2] [2019-07-23 00:31:43] Cliff AB

This is a two part quote I've heard a few times:

Machine learning is statistics minus any checking of models and assumptions.

Brian D. Ripley

In that case, maybe we should get rid of checking of models and assumptions more often. Then maybe we'd be able to solve some of the problems that the machine learning people can solve but we can't!

Andrew Gelman

Link [1] (Ripley is quoted as making the statement at the useR forum, Gelman responds to the quote on his blog).

There's some irony in the sides taken by these two statisticians in this conversation. That is, some of Brian Ripley's early work was on Neural Networks, which is an extremely popular topic in Machine Learning, where as Andrew Gelman is exclusively known for Bayesian statistics in which he advocates taking one's statistical models very seriously.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2008/12/03/machine_learnin/

@usεr11852: what part about it being a rant is a problem in my quote? And I think that exactly the point: for a long time statisticians (btw, I am one) ranted about ML approaches, while these approaches continuously got very positive results on problems statisticians had essentially given up on. - Cliff AB
@usεr11852: also I updated the post to include a link. - Cliff AB
I dislike/I do not find it useful as a quote. (Obviously I have nothing against your technical answers here or BDR's great achievements as a statistician.) - usεr11852
147
[+2] [2019-11-09 01:52:24] PsychometStats

A statistical procedure is not an automatic, mechanical truth-generating machine

Meehl (1992) [1]

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00269.x?casa_token=2l_YQCsYdGkAAAAA:gx5oof309naI5T-4I6LY2Iu24QtyNe9-rhY1gfr4C6wQtjHX3XrHFknhkXsZ7Cjh-NWcuEc_iPi_Qe0

148
[+2] [2020-07-29 07:59:19] Sextus Empiricus

The problem of modern day governments is that they try to get more than half the people above the median levels of income, health, happiness, education etc.


Source of the quote? - usεr11852
149
[+2] [2022-03-28 10:54:21] AnthonyC

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf


150
[+1] [2017-11-01 00:47:20] Sinan Ünür

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 chowkidar (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases [ link [1]].

-- Josiah Stamp, recounting a story from Harold Cox, Some Economic Factors in Modern Life (1929), p. 258.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Statistics#Quotes

151
[+1] [2022-06-08 00:03:13] dipetkov

You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.

-- Florence Nightingale, fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, pioneer in data visualization and founder of modern nursing


I came upon this quote in the book The Data Detective by Tim Harford. He tells the story of how the quote was long misattributed to William Farr in a post on his blog. It's a good story. - dipetkov
152
[-3] [2010-07-27 16:50:51] Harvey Motulsky

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Michael Crichton


It's unfortunate that consensus has so much control over what kind of science gets funded. - Sharpie
(6) That's because consensus is a practical means of establishing the validity of a scientific position. Sound science cannot be conducted by a single person. It requires peer review. Having achieved a popular consensus implies that the science in question has passed peer review. Whereas a theory or position held by a lone individual and opposed by the rest of the scientific community is likely to have failed the process of peer review. If you're not an expert in field X, then statistically you're better off following popular consensus within field X. - Lèse majesté
(5) To elaborate: if you're a politician who has no background in field X, then it is far better that you simply consult the consensus of experts in that field of research than to misinterpret the data first-hand. What is problematic is when lay persons disregard overwhelming scientific consensus for data misrepresented to them by a fringe minority--especially when these lay persons are in charge of policy decisions. It's much easier to mislead a handful of politicians than thousands of expert researchers... - Lèse majesté
(31) -1 This is an intellectually dishonest quote from a bad novelist, playing up a popular romantic myth of scientists as Rand-esque revolutionary loners in order to pander to anti-science crankery. Moreover, it has nothing whatsoever to do with statistics. What is it even doing in this list? - walkytalky
-1, see what @walkytalky and @Lèse majesté said. - fabians
(2) (-1) also (concur with @walkytalky), and @lese - note that "...consult the consensus of experts in that field of research than to misinterpret the data first-hand" can be cheekily rebutted by "I consult the experts so that I can mis-interpret the data second-hand". - probabilityislogic
(1) "Consensus: General agreement among the members of a given group or community, each of which exercises some discretion in decision-making and follow-up action" - fairly fitting, and not, as various climate deniers would have you believe, equivalent to "100% agreement, no questions asked". - naught101
(2) What's the scientific consensus on the scientific validity of this quote? - Mark L. Stone
(1) Quite apart from lacking statistical content, the quotation seems almost complete nonsense. Even scientific revolutionaries end up changing the consensus, and most mavericks and cranks in science are precisely that, mavericks and cranks. As for consensus in politics, that's hard to discern. - Nick Cox
Plogiston theory, Phenology, Epicycles and numerous other consensus theories are now discredited by consensus. What then about consensus is reliable? On the other hand, what about consensus is relevant to a mathematical proof? Worse there are truths, e.g., mathematical ones, that can be stated but are not provable., see Gödel's incompleteness theorems. However, any particular complete proposition is either true or not, nor does consensus affect truth value. Many mavericks are called and few are chosen, but to change a consensus only mavericks need apply. - Carl
153