Daily Inspiration Quote by Ronald Fisher

Fisher lands the jab with a coroner’s chill: if you invite statistical thinking only after you’ve finished collecting data, you’re not doing science so much as diagnosing a corpse. The line works because it’s funny in the way a scalpel is funny - clean, clinical, and slightly cruel. The “statistician” becomes a specialist summoned too late, allowed to name the failure but powerless to prevent it.

The intent is disciplinary and political. Fisher wasn’t merely defending a toolbox; he was asserting a hierarchy of expertise. In his world, statistics isn’t window-dressing for results you already want to believe. It’s architecture: randomization, controls, sample size, and pre-specified hypotheses. Get those wrong, and no amount of p-values can resurrect credibility. His metaphor also anticipates a modern pathology: data dredging dressed up as discovery. If you rummage through a dataset looking for anything that sparkles, the statistician can often identify the cause of death afterward: confounding, bias, underpowered design, multiple comparisons, a garden of forking paths.

The subtext is moral as much as methodological: post hoc analysis is a kind of intellectual opportunism, and Fisher is shaming it. Coming from the architect of experimental design in agriculture and a key figure in the rise of modern inference, the remark reflects a moment when statistics was fighting to be embedded upstream, not outsourced downstream. It’s a warning with contemporary bite: analytics teams brought in at the “insights” stage are frequently being asked not to discover truth, but to certify it.