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Probability/Statistics Quotes

• "Null-hypothesis tests are not completely stupid, but Bayesian statistics are better."
  (Rindskopf, 1998).
• Forever glorious be your name, o wise guest of my thoughts, for it proves irrefutably that The Everything is Certainly Probable! ?
• "valid defense of using non-Bayesian methods, namely incompetence" (Skilling, 1992). The often heated debates between Bayesians and non-Bayesians are well known. For example, Skilling (1991, pg. 24) writes, �there is a valid defence [sic] of using non-Bayesian methods, namely incompetence.� Skilling, J. (1991). Fundamentals of MaxEnt in data analysis. In �Maximum Entropy in Action�, Brian Buck and Vincent A. Macaulay (Ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, England. Statistics is the physics of numbers. Persi Diaconis
• "What the use of P implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred."
  Jeffreys (1961)
• "relative in part to [our] ignorance, in part to [our] knowledge"
  Laplace (1820, p.6) (in Howson and Urbach (1993) page 22)
• "The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability."
  Pierre Simon de Laplace, "Th�orie Analytique des Probabilit�s"
• "If statistics is an applied field and not a minor branch of mathematics, then more than 99% of the published papers are useless exercises."
  Breiman (1995).
• "probability does not exist"
  Bruno de Finetti
• Intuition is a poor guide when facing probabilistic evidence
• Inside every nonBayesian there is a Bayesian struggling to get out
  Dennis V. Lindley
• "Every allowed extension of Aristotelian logic to plausibility theory is isomorphic to Bayesian probability theory"
• "There are no problems left in statistics except the assessment of probability"
  A quote from a colleague in Lindley (2000)
• All models are false, but some are useful
• "Garrett Birkhoff wrote (in 1948): Everybody speaks of probability, but no one is able to say what it is, in a way which is satisfactory for others."
  page 511 de Finetti book
• "The most important maxim for data analysis to heed, and one which many statisticians seem to have shunned, is this: Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise"
  Tukey (1962) pp. 13-14 [de Finetti book page 480]
• 'I agree with Herman Rubin's remark, at the Waterloo conference on scientific inference in 1970, that a “good Bayesian does better than a non-Bayesian but a bad Bayesian gets clobbered.”'
  Good (1983) page 139
• "Statistics has been the most successful information science."
  "Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it."
  Brad Efron
• "...if this [probability] calculus be condemned, then the whole of the sciences must also be condemned."
  Henri Poincar[e/] (in Howson and Urbach (1993))
• "Our assent ought to be regulated by the grounds of probability."
  John Locke (in Howson and Urbach (1993))
• "[t]oday's posterior distribution is tomorrow's prior"
  Lindley (1970, p. 38) (in Howson and Urbach (1993) p. 118)
• Several centuries earlier, Pascal � one of the founders of probability theory � had come to the same conclusion, when in the Pens�es he asks ironically: �Is it probable that probability brings certainty?�