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Twinkle Soni
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“When our forebears asked - What is a man? - they did not expect a detailed examination of some Saturday morning shopper, Mr. John Q. Public, snatched at random from the crowded agora and forced under a microscope or onto a psychiatrist's couch. Nor did they want a statistical analysis of some cross-section of the demos for an answer. Of what good to sound learning is a man who looks like every man but in whom no man sees himself? The only use for such analyses, as our modern era shows, is in various forms of exploitation. Statistical man makes a useful abstraction for advertisers and propagandists.”
― Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education
― Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education
“Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as "her luck has run out" and "He is due." That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store.”
― The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
― The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
“Research doesn't assure definite rewards, but it assures lesser risk.”
― Wealth of Words
― Wealth of Words
“Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story.”
― Belladonna
― Belladonna
“This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.”
― Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
― Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
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