“Be like the king, not like his kingdom.”
“Significance unfortunately is a useful means toward a personal ends in the advance of science - status and widely distributed publications, a big laboratory, a staff of research assistants, a reduction in teaching load, a better salary, the finer wines of Bordeaux. Precision, knowledge, and control. In a narrow and cynical sense statistical significance is the way to achieve these. Design experiment. Then calculate statistical significance. Publish articles showing "significant" results. Enjoy promotion.
But it is not science, and it will not last.”
Source: The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives
“No data are excluded on subjective or arbitrary grounds. No one piece of data is more highly valued than another. The consequences of this policy have to be accepted, even if they prove awkward.”
Source: Place-Names in the Knossos Tablets Identification and Location
“The aim of the research is to determine what groups can be drawn up as a result of regular association of place-names. A further step is to consider whether such groups have a geographical significance. This was accepted by Palmer as a reasonable hypothesis; Wilson argued the case for it by considering possible ways in which information to be recorded on the tablets was received by the scribes. Underlying this work is the assumption that groupings may have a geographical basis, but it has still to be shown that this is a reasonable assumption.”
Source: Place-Names in the Knossos Tablets Identification and Location
“That’s the thing with science. We’re drilled to believe that false positives are bad, but false negatives are just as terrifying.”
Source: The Love Hypothesis
“Your relevance as a data custodian is your ability to analyse and interpret it. If you can’t, your replacement is due.”
“The average human being follows the statistics but the success minded human being changes the face of the statistics.”
Source: Life, The theory of Everything: Succeeding in the 21st century and beyond
“Statisticians are the most dangerous creatures on the face of the planet.”
“Access is one of those words that should raise red flags when you encounter them in statistics. People having access to health care might simply mean they live near a medical facility, not that the facility would admit them or that they could pay for it. As you learned above, C-SPAN is available in 100 million homes, but that doesn’t mean that 100 million people are watching it. I could claim that 90 percent of the world’s population has “access” to Weaponized Lies by showing that 90 percent of the population is within twenty-five miles of an Internet connection, rail line, road, landing strip, port, or dogsled route.”
Source: A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
“Collecting data using improper methods can spoil any statistical analysis”
Source: Basic Business Statistics Concepts and Applications