How Not to Be Wrong Quotes

“That’s when we shore up our intuition with a few sturdy, well-placed theorems and techniques, and make out of it a mathematical theory of probability.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The atmosphere combined the intellectual openness and intensity of an academic department with the shared sense of purpose that comes only with high stakes.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“And when you know how to do something the right way, it’s hard—for some stubborn people, impossible—to make yourself explain it the wrong way.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The problem is, there’s no consensus on which programs are the worthless ones. In large part, that’s because most Americans think the programs that benefit them personally are the ones that must, at all costs, be preserved. (I didn’t say we weren’t selfish, I just said we weren’t stupid!)”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“The missing bullet holes were on the missing planes. The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back. Whereas the large number of planes returning to base with a thoroughly Swiss-cheesed fuselage is pretty strong evidence that hits to the fuselage can (and therefore should) be tolerated. If you go to the recovery room at the hospital, you’ll see a lot more people with bullet holes in their legs than people with bullet holes in their chests. But that’s not because people don’t get shot in the chest; it’s because the people who get shot in the chest don’t recover.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place—requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Aristotle observes that eating either too much or too little is troubling to the constitution.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PUBLIC OPINION”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.” —BERTRAND RUSSELL, “The Study of Mathematics” (1902)”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“If you have before you a square whose side has length X, its area is X times X—indeed, that’s why we call the operation of multiplying a number by itself squaring!”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Why is the second novel by a breakout debut writer, or the second album by an explosively popular band, so seldom as good as the first? It's not, Or not entirely, because most artists only have one thing to say. It's because artistic success is an amalgam of talent and fortune, like every- thing else in life, and thus subject to regression to the mean.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The more chances you give yourself to be surprised, the higher your threshold for surprise had better be. If a random Internet stranger who eliminated all North American grains from his food intake reports that he dropped fifteen pounds and his eczema went away, you shouldn’t take that as powerful evidence in favor of the maize-free plan. Somebody’s selling a book about that plan, and thousands of people bought that book and tried it, and the odds are very good that, by chance alone, one among them will experience some weight loss and clear skin the next week. And that’s the guy who’s going to log in as saygoodbye2corn452 and post his excited testimonial, while the people for whom the diet failed stay silent.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are. This insight isn’t new.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“There is a proper measure in things. There are, finally, certain boundaries short of and beyond which what is right cannot exist”).”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we’d now call mathematics, things we’d now call religion, and things we’d now call mental illness. They believed that odd numbers were good and even numbers evil; that a planet identical to our own, the Antichthon, lay on the other side of the sun; and that it was wrong to eat beans, by some accounts because they were the repository of dead people’s souls. Pythagoras himself was said to have had the ability to talk”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“All mathematical writing is creative writing.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“I came into the Big Money making pictures during World War II,” [Reagan] would always say. At that time the wartime income surtax hit 90 percent. “You could only make four pictures and then you were in the top bracket,” he would continue. “So we all quit working after about four pictures and went off to the country.” High tax rates caused less work. Low tax rates caused more. His experience proved it. These”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“Mathematics is not just a sequence of computations to be carried out by rote until your patience or stamina runs out—although it might seem that way from what you’ve been taught in courses called mathematics.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“The human body is an immensely complex system, and there are only a few of its features we can measure, let alone manipulate. Based on the correlations we can observe, there are lots of drugs that might plausibly have a desired health effect. And so you try them out in experiments, and most of them fail dismally. To work in drug development requires a resilient psyche, not to mention a vast pool of capital.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Democracy is a mess—but it kind of works.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“I was elected to lead—not to watch the polls.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The average American thinks there are plenty of non-worthwhile federal programs that are wasting our money and is ready and willing to put them on the chopping block to make ends meet. The problem is, there’s no consensus on which programs are the worthless ones.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“It’s an unflattering portrait of the American public. Either we are babies, unable to grasp that budget cuts will inevitably reduce funding to programs we support; or we are mulish, irrational children, who understand the math but refuse to accept it.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“This reminds me of an old story from the Harvard math department, concerning one of the grand old Russian professors, whom we shall call O. Professor O is midway through an intricate algebraic derivation when a student in the back row raises his hand. “Professor O, I didn’t follow that last step. Why do those two operators commute?” The professor raises his eyebrows and says, “Eet ees obvious.” But the student persists: “I’m sorry, Professor O, I really don’t see it.” So Professor O goes back to the board and adds a few lines of explanation. “What we must do? Well, the two operators are both diagonalized by . . . well, it is not exactly diagonalized but . . . just a moment . . .” Professor O pauses for a little while, peering at what’s on the board and scratching his chin. Then he retreats to his office. About ten minutes go by. The students are about to start leaving when Professor O returns, and again assumes his station in front of the chalkboard. “Yes,” he says, satisfied. “Eet ees obvious”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“the mathematical approach is a formalized version of our natural mental reckonings, an extension of common sense by other means.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“probabilities of uncertain events can be mathematically described and manipulated—but are in fact not obvious at all. If they were, they would not have arrived so late in the history of human thought.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“if you want an honest view of what’s going on, you also have to consider the planes that didn’t come back.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“When you’re trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“smaller populations are inherently more variable.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking