A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

Quotes

1. Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify.

   p. 45

2. 

   You can only predict things after they’ve happened.

   p. 7

3. 

   Two dangers threaten the world—order and disorder.

   p. 123

4. 

   Rigid distinctions between the deep and the shallow are generally themselves quite superficial.

   p. 169

5. 

   Always be smart; seldom be certain.

   p. 201

6. 

   One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purposes at hand, but one shouldn’t be surprised when normal curves behave normally.

   p. 61

7. 

   It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us.

   p. 3

8. 

   Almost any bunkum has some partial validity, and we regularly read into the confusing mess what we want to see.

   p. 202

9. 

   There is a fine line between public expressions of faith and aggressive declarations thereof, and religious tolerance is inversely proportional to the latter.

   p. 198

10. 

    Gullible citizens are a demagogue’s dream.

    p. 165

11. 

    Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term.

    p. 96

12. 

    The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison.

    p. 173

13. 

    When the law’s on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.

    p. 106

14. 

    There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge.

    p. 180

15. 

    In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes.

    p. 60

16. 

    Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty.

    p. 7

17. 

    I’ve argued that the set of standard questions journalists ask and readers want answers should be enlarged. Besides Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, it should include How many? How likely? What fraction? How does the quantity compare with other quantities? What is its rate of growth, and how does that compare? What about the self-referential aspects of the story? Is there an appropriate degree of complexity in it? Are we looking at the right categories and relations? How much of the story is independent of its reporting? Are we especially vulnerable to the availability error or to anchoring effects?

    If statistics are presented, how were they obtained? How confident can we be of them? Were they derived from a random sample or from a collection of anecdotes? Does the correlation suggest a causal relationship, or is it merely a coincidence? And do we understand how the people and various pieces of an organization reported upon are connected? What is known about the dynamics of the whole system? Are they stable or do they seem sensitive to tiny perturbations? Are there other ways to tally any figures presented? Do such figures measure what they purport to measure? Is the precision recounted meaningful?

    p. 201

That’s all the quotes.

17 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more