"Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures"
About this Quote
Evan Esar turns the prestige of statistics into a cautionary joke, pointing to the gap between measurement and meaning. Reliable figures can be collected with care, yet the moment they are arranged into a story or pressed into a conclusion, the reliability can evaporate. Sampling choices, definitions, baselines, and the way averages hide distributions all shape the story. Correlation can be mistaken for causation; margins of error get ignored; cherry-picked time frames and categories manufacture certainty where there should be doubt. Numbers can be impeccably precise and still be used to make claims that wobble.
The word science sharpens the irony. Statistics promises rigor, but humans do the interpreting, and their incentives often bend the arc of analysis. A method designed to quantify uncertainty gets recast as a machine that produces unassailable facts. The punchline exposes that sleight of hand: authority is borrowed from the mathematics while the unreliable part arrives in the framing.
Esar, a midcentury American humorist known for witty redefinitions, wrote at a time when polling, advertising, and government metrics were expanding. His quip sits comfortably alongside the line often attributed to Twain about lies and statistics, and it anticipates the skepticism popularized by Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics. The culture was learning how powerful numbers could be in politics and commerce, and how easily they could be massaged.
The joke does not discard statistics; it warns against credulity. If the figures are indeed reliable, care must be taken when turning them into facts: make assumptions explicit, respect uncertainty, look for alternative explanations, and check whether the model fits the question. In an era of dashboards and algorithms, the humor still bites. The cleaner the figure, the more tempting it is to overtrust it. Esar’s line nudges us to keep our eye on the interpretive leap, where reliability can be lost or preserved.
The word science sharpens the irony. Statistics promises rigor, but humans do the interpreting, and their incentives often bend the arc of analysis. A method designed to quantify uncertainty gets recast as a machine that produces unassailable facts. The punchline exposes that sleight of hand: authority is borrowed from the mathematics while the unreliable part arrives in the framing.
Esar, a midcentury American humorist known for witty redefinitions, wrote at a time when polling, advertising, and government metrics were expanding. His quip sits comfortably alongside the line often attributed to Twain about lies and statistics, and it anticipates the skepticism popularized by Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics. The culture was learning how powerful numbers could be in politics and commerce, and how easily they could be massaged.
The joke does not discard statistics; it warns against credulity. If the figures are indeed reliable, care must be taken when turning them into facts: make assumptions explicit, respect uncertainty, look for alternative explanations, and check whether the model fits the question. In an era of dashboards and algorithms, the humor still bites. The cleaner the figure, the more tempting it is to overtrust it. Esar’s line nudges us to keep our eye on the interpretive leap, where reliability can be lost or preserved.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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