John Allen Paulos

Quotes

1. 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

2. 

   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

3. 

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

   p. 60

4. 

   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

5. 

   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

6. 

   There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.

   p. 44

7. 

   The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.

   p. 37

8. 

   Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most.

   p. 159

9. 

   There surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability.

   p. 62

10. 

    There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion.

    p. 147

11. 

    Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?

    p. 110

12. 

    Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama.

    p. 6