Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Lang

The line lands because it makes bad forecasting look less like an honest mistake and more like a moral failure: not ignorance, but misuse. Lang’s comparison is cruelly efficient. A lamp-post exists to cast light, yet the drunk clings to it to stay upright. That’s the whole indictment of sloppy statistics in one image: numbers treated as a crutch to prop up a conclusion you already wanted, not a tool to see what’s actually there.

Calling the forecaster “unsophisticated” is pointed Victorian shade. It’s not about lacking data; it’s about lacking discipline. Lang is aiming at a recognizable social type of his era: the confident man in public life (journalist, pamphleteer, political operative) who adopts the new prestige of statistics the way earlier ages borrowed Latin tags. The subtext is that modernity has invented fresh ways to launder bias. Arithmetic becomes a costume.

As a poet, Lang understands that persuasion is often aesthetic before it’s logical. The joke works because the metaphor is physical and humiliating: you can picture the sway, the grip, the self-seriousness collapsing into farce. It also anticipates a very current critique. In politics, business, even sports analytics, we still see dashboards built to reassure, not to reveal; models tuned to defend a narrative, not test it. Lang’s warning isn’t anti-quantitative. It’s anti-theatrics: if your stats don’t change what you’re willing to believe, they’re just street furniture.