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"We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them." William James.
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"Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty." John Finley.
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"Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability."R. A. Fisher.
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"... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation."R. A. Fisher.
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"Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death" Hilaire Belloc
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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. – Sir R.A. Fisher (1938)
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All models are wrong, but some are useful. – George Box
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Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models. –George Box.
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The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. – John Tukey.
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Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai. –Jonathan Rosenberg.
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Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it. – Brad Efron
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My thesis is simply this: probability does not exist. – Bruno de Finetti.
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The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. – Joseph Stalin.
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The plural of anecdote is not data. – Roger Brinner.
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To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it. –Box, Hunter, and Hunter.
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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. – John Tukey.
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. – Carl Sagan.
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… the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only to give the
facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis. – Sir R.A. Fisher.
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I think it is much more interesting to live with uncertainty than to live with answers that might be wrong. – Richard Feynman.
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Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. – Niels Bohr.
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All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. – Ralph Waldo Emerson .
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Strange events permit themselves the luxury of occurring. – Charlie Chan.
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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. – John Tukey.
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Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary a qualification for efficient
citizenship as the ability to read and write. – H.G. Wells.
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In God we trust. All others must bring data. – W. Edwards Deming.
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An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem. – John Tukey.
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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.
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If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it. - Albert Einstein.
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A statistical analysis, properly conducted, is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions. – M.J. Moroney.
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[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.
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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.
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… 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 R.A. Fisher (1956).
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The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process. – George Box.
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Statistics’ real contribution to society is primarily moral, not technical. – Steve Vardeman and Max Morris.