Standard Deviations Quotes

“During the dot-com bubble, most people did not use a persuasive theory to gauge whether stock prices were too high, too low, or just right. Instead, as they watched stock prices go up, they invented explanations to rationalize what was happening. They talked about Moore’s Law, smart kids, and Alan Greenspan. Data without theory.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“Our inherited desire to explain what we see fuels two kinds of cognitive errors. First, we are too easily seduced by patterns and by the theories that explain them. Second, we latch onto data that support our theories and discount contradicting evidence. We believe stories simply because they are consistent with the patterns we observe and, once we have a story, we are reluctant to let it go.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“We see the same behavior when athletes wear unwashed lucky socks, when investors buy hot stocks, or when people throw good money after bad, confident that things must take a turn for the better. We yearn to make an uncertain world more certain, to gain control over things that we do not control, to predict the unpredictable. If we did well wearing these socks, then it must be that these socks help us do well. If other people made money buying this stock, then we can make money buying this stock. If we have had bad luck, our luck has to change, right? Order is more comforting than chaos. These cognitive errors make us susceptible to all sorts of statistical deceptions. We are too quick to assume that meaningless patterns are meaningful when they are presented as evidence of the consequences of a government policy, the power of a marketing plan, the success of an investment strategy, or the benefits of a food supplement. Our vulnerability comes from a deep desire to make sense of the world, and it’s notoriously hard to shake off.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“Kahneman later wrote: This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“Ronald Coase cynically observed that, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“Be doubly skeptical of graphs that have two vertical axes and omit zero from either or both axes.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“Finding a historical correlation between gold and silver prices is no more convincing than finding a historical correlation between marriage and beer consumption. All it demonstrates is that we looked long enough to find a correlation.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“In carpentry, they say, “Measure twice, cut once.” With data, “Think twice, calculate once.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“There are few statistical facts more interesting than regression to the mean for two reasons. First, people encounter it almost every day of their lives. Second, almost nobody understands it.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

“When a theory is generated by ransacking data, we can’t use these pillaged data to test the theory.”
― Gary Smith, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics