How Not to Be Wrong Quotes

“Working an integral or performing a 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.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“not every curve is a line.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“It means you’re best off resisting the lure of the hot new fund that made 10% over the last twelve months. Better to follow the deeply unsexy advice you’re probably sick of hearing, the “eat your vegetables and take the stairs” of financial planning: instead of hunting for a magic system or an adviser with a golden touch, put your money in a big dull low-fee index fund and forget about it.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“It comes back to his math-trained habits of thought. A mathematician is always asking, “What assumptions are you making?”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“military no doubt have a pretty good idea. One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don’t win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That’s not the stuff war movies are made of, but it’s the stuff wars are made of. And there’s math every step of the way.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Improbability, as described here, is a relative notion, not an absolute one; when we say an outcome is improbable, we are always saying, explicitly or not, that it is improbable under some set of hypotheses we've made about the underlying mechanisms of the world.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The lessons of mathematics are simple ones and there are no numbers in them: that there is structure in the world; that we can hope to understand some of it and not just gape at what our senses present to us; that our intuition is stronger with a formal exoskeleton than without one. And that mathematical certainity is one thing, the softer convictions we find attached to us in everyday life another, and we should keep track of the difference if we can.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Mathematics is the study of things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“countries don’t win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That’s not the stuff war movies are made of, but it’s the stuff wars are made of. And there’s math every step of the way. —”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“it is probable that improbable things will happen. Granted this, one might argue that what is improbable is probable.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study of things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Usually, when someone announces they’re a “nonlinear thinker” they’re about to apologize for losing something you lent them.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The unknown is a stone in the sea, which obstructs our progress. We can try to pack dynamite in the crevices of rock, detonate it, and repeat until the rock breaks apart, as Buffon did with his complicated computations in calculus. Or you can take a more contemplative approach, allowing your level of understanding gradually and gently to rise, until after a time what appeared as an obstacle is overtopped by the calm water, and is gone. Mathematics as currently practiced is a delicate interplay between monastic contemplation and blowing stuff up with dynamite”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Квадрат на малюнку зветься вписаним квадратом; кожен з його кутів лише дотикається до кола, але за нього не виходить. Навіщо це робити? Тому що круги таємничі й бентежні, а з квадратами просто.”
― Джордан Елленберг, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Недостатньо того, щоб дані узгоджувалися з вашою теорією; вони мусять не узгоджуватися із запереченням вашої теорії”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“the interesting thing about the slime mold is that it makes pretty good decisions.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Risky strategies can be analyzed numerically; uncertain strategies, Ellsberg suggested, were beyond the bounds of formal mathematical analysis”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“if your government isn’t wasteful, you’re spending too much time fighting government waste.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That’s how conspiracy theories work.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“numerically flavored advice.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The significance test is the detective, not the judge.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Data is messy, and inference is hard.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Assessing the scale of the p-hacking problem is not so easy—”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“They’re running the con on themselves.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“If you decide what color jelly beans to eat based just on the papers that get published, you’re making the same mistake the army made when they counted the bullet holes on the planes that came back from Germany.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“For one thing, we’re doing publishing wrong.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“statistically noticeable” or “statistically detectable” instead of “statistically significant”! That would be truer to the meaning of the method,”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“But the significance test that scientists use doesn’t measure importance.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“scientists and statisticians have already been worrying about them for quite some time.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking