"Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census"
About this Quote
Rob Lowe’s line lands with the tidy confidence of someone borrowing authority on purpose: “statisticians have told us” is less a citation than a shield. As an actor - a profession built on performance, persuasion, and public-facing plausibility - Lowe frames a technical claim in the language of trust, not math. The intent isn’t to teach sampling theory; it’s to make a complicated, politically charged process feel like common sense delivered by invisible experts.
The subtext is quietly modern: we live in an age that wants the benefits of “data-driven” decision-making without the friction of actually counting everyone. A census is expensive, slow, and exposes uncomfortable truths about who gets missed. Sampling, by contrast, sounds sleek: efficient, rational, optimized. Lowe’s phrasing lets that efficiency read as moral virtue. “More effective” becomes a value statement as much as a methodological one, implying that full enumeration is quaint bureaucracy while sampling is smart governance.
Context matters because “census” is never just about numbers; it’s about representation and resources. Who is counted determines political power, funding, and visibility. That’s why the appeal to statisticians is doing double duty: it launders a distributional fight through technical language. The line also captures a broader cultural habit: outsourcing legitimacy to experts while keeping the pitch conversational. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s expert-flavored reassurance, designed to settle an argument before it starts.
The subtext is quietly modern: we live in an age that wants the benefits of “data-driven” decision-making without the friction of actually counting everyone. A census is expensive, slow, and exposes uncomfortable truths about who gets missed. Sampling, by contrast, sounds sleek: efficient, rational, optimized. Lowe’s phrasing lets that efficiency read as moral virtue. “More effective” becomes a value statement as much as a methodological one, implying that full enumeration is quaint bureaucracy while sampling is smart governance.
Context matters because “census” is never just about numbers; it’s about representation and resources. Who is counted determines political power, funding, and visibility. That’s why the appeal to statisticians is doing double duty: it launders a distributional fight through technical language. The line also captures a broader cultural habit: outsourcing legitimacy to experts while keeping the pitch conversational. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s expert-flavored reassurance, designed to settle an argument before it starts.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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