Don T Be A Statistic Quotes

Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.

What are you really studying?" He leans back to look at her. "The statistical probability of love at first sight." "Very funny," she says. "What is it really?" "I'm serious." "I don't believe you." He laughs, then lowers his mouth so that it's close to her ear. "People who meet in airports are seventy-two percent more likely too fall for each other than people who meet anywhere else.

You know what they say," Dad said. "If you love something set it free." "What if he doesn't come back?" "Something do, somethings don't," he said, reaching to tweak her nose. "I'll always come back to you anyway." "You don't light up," Hadley said, but Dad only smiled. "I do when I'm with you.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don't know we don't know.

Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity, you will become a statistic.

It as true that normal people couldn't hear Gaspode speak, because dogs don't speak. It's a well know fact. ... Besides, almost all dogs don't talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored.

Don't you read the statistics? Guns are unisex these days.

Imagine the earth’s population of six billion people reduced to just one hundred representatives. Statistically, that makes 30 white, 70 non-white. It means 6 people own 59% of the wealth and they all live in North America. 80 are in substandard housing. One has an education. One owns a computer. Don’t blame me if it all sounds crazy.

The fact that you exist is a highly statistically improbable event, and if you are not perpetually surprised by the fact that you exist you don’t deserve to be here.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Because there are 176 definitions for the word loser on urbandictionary.com. Don't Be a Statistic.

Don't complain or blame to others, you are the one who selected wrong person,now get up ,wipe your tears and correct your statistics and now make a wiser choice. Learn to judge people, learn from your master(god,parents,teacher,best friend).

1. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better make sure kids can’t get guns. 2. So, disturbed kids are taking guns to school and killing teachers and classmates. We better find out what’s making these kids want to kill, fix that, and then they won’t want to use guns to kill teachers and classmates. See what I did there? Which statement makes more sense? Don’t bring up politics. Don’t refer to statistical data. Don’t nervously look at your cell phone. Just read the two statements and be honest with yourself. We can do better. We’re smarter than this. WAKE UP.

It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.

There is nothing virtuous or noble about being "tolerant" of people whose attitudes and behaviors you approve of. If you don't defend the freedom of even those individuals whose attitudes and behaviors you find disgusting, narrow-minded and offensive, then you are not tolerant. To "tolerate" doesn't mean you like it or approve of it; it means only that you ALLOW it to EXIST--i.e., you refrain from violently interfering. The people who look to "government" to FORCE people to be "nice" are not tolerant.

That's when I realize that the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore. I realize that I don't care about the Officer pacing below or the other hikers among the trees, or really anything else at all, and that is when I realize how dangerous this truly is.

Most of you will have heard the maxim "correlation does not imply causation." Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs.

In the interest of ultimate honesty,” Celine cut in, “I’m pretty sure that everyone present would appreciate it if you two got a room.” “I wouldn’t,” Dean grumbled. “I am unbothered by displays of physical and emotional intimacy,” Sloane volunteered. “The nuances and statistics underlying courtship behavior are quite fascinating.” The edges of Celine’s lips quirked upward as she met Sloane’s gaze. “You don’t say.” Sloane frowned. “I just did.

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so. —Artemus Ward

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But...we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do NOTHING. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-the overstressed executive who goes on vacation but who cannot relax.

Physicians don’t do the best for their patients because they: practice defensive medicine (Self-defense), do not understand health statistics (Innumeracy), or pursue profit instead of virtue (Conflicts of interest).

Listen, in a few hours our little world will turn herself right-side-up-again, and you will forget about all the ways this lonely night sang you watered-down blues and your hands will start to make sense again. You think you've seen every ugly corner of this whole rotten world, but listen: There is an infinite number of things we don't know and, statistically speaking, at least half of them are probably very, very, beautiful.

I'm not sure I even believe in marriage," Hadley says and he looks surprised. "Aren't you on your way to a wedding?" "Yeah," she says with a nod. "But that's what I mean." He looks at her blankly. "It shouldn't be this big fuss, where you drag everyone halfway across the world to witness your love. If you want to share your life together, fine. But it's between two people, and that should be enough. Why the big show? Why rub it in everyone's faces?" Oliver runs a hand along his jaw, obviously not quite sure what to think. "It sounds like its weddings you don't believe in," he says finally. "Not marriage." "I'm not such a big fan of either at the moment." "I don't know," he says. "I think they're kind of nice." "They're not," she insists. "They're all for show. You shouldn't need to prove anything if you really mean it. It should be a whole lot simpler than that. It should mean something." "I think it does," Oliver says quietly. "It's a promise." "I guess so," she says, unable to keep the sigh out of her voice. "But not everyone keeps that promise." she looks over toward the woman, still fast asleep. "Not everyone makes it fifty-two years, and if you do, it doesn't matter that you once stood in front of all those people and said that you would. The important part is that you had someone to stick by you all that time. Even when everything sucked.

We really don’t get all the government we pay for, and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do.

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics.

average men and women don’t really exist except as a statistical conceit.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!

I opened the fire door to four lips none of which were mine kissing tightened my belt around my hips where your hands were missing and stepped out into the cold collar high under the slate grey sky the air was smoking and the streets were dry and I wasn't joking when I said Good Bye magazine quality men talking on the corner French, no less much less of them then us so why do I feel like something's been rearranged? you know, taken out of context I must seem so strange killed a cockroach so big it left a puddle of pus on the wall when you and I are lying in bed you don't seem so tall I'm singing now because my tear ducts are too tired and my brain is disconnected but my heart is wired I make such a good statistic someone should study me now somebody's got to be interested in how I feel just 'cause I'm here and I'm real oh, how I miss substituting the conclusion to confrontation with a kiss and oh, how I miss walking up to the edge and jumping in like I could feel the future on your skin I opened the fire door to four lips none of which were mine kissing I opened the fire door

Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of Americans are totally batshit. but having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you're manic depressive. OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I'm surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I've taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I'd share with you. So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you're mentally disordered 1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable? 2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight? 3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people? 4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to? 5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued? 6. Do you think about sex a lot? If you don't say yes to any of these questions either you're lying, or you don't speak English, or you're illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you a few chapters ago.

If a magic genie, from a lamp, offered me three wishes, I'd use one to wish you a happy birthday. So 33 percent would be spent in your celebration. I only offer that statistic so you don't think me chintzy when you find this card void of cash.

So, I convinced myself that, because the statistical likelihood of something happening in real life exactly the way I imagined it was so low, if I imagined the worst possible things in vivid detail, I could mathematically reduce the odds of them happening. I convinced myself that my brain had power over the probability projections of the universe. I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the worst stuff that could happen like it was my job, and I don’t know if I ever really broke the habit.

Divorce is a marital welfare. It's just couples asking society to bail them out because they didn't do enough research before they got married. How is that our fault? Don't drag down my country's statistics just because you ran off and got hitched before you ever saw each other in a bad mood.

Misconceptions are like cockroaches: you have no idea where they came from, but they’re everywhere—often where you don’t expect them—and they’re impervious to nuclear weapons.

Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.

I fire again and again, and none of the bullets come close. "Statistically speaking," the Erudite boy next to me-his name is Will-says, grinning at me, "you should have hit the target at least once by now, even by accident." He is blond, with shaggy hair and a crease between his eyebrows. "Is that so," I say without inflection. "Yeah," he says. "I think you're actually defying nature." I grit my teeth and turn toward the target, resolving to at least stand still. If I can't muster the first task they give us,how will I ever make it through stage one? I squeeze the trigger,hard, and this time I'm ready for the recoil.It makes my hand jump back,but my feet stay planted.A bullet hole appears at the edge of the target,and I raise an eyebrow at Will. "So you see,I'm right.The stats don't lie," he says. I smile a little.

I was going back and reading Marconi’s last book again, and there’s this part that always gets me. He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere else.

There is nothing in the entire American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that describes my shit. I have three degrees in psychology, and I still don’t know what’s wrong with me, other than the fact that I’m a bad psychologist, obviously.

Good," Violet says. "Because I'll expect you to come back over when Monty and I get married." "Monty?" Hadley asks, staring at her. She tries to successfully to recall if she's even seen them speak to each other. "You guys are engaged?" "Not yet," Violet says as she starts walking toward the dinning room. "But you don't look so gobsmacked. I've got a good feeling about it." Hadley falls into step beside her. "That's it? A good feeling?" "That's it," she says. "I think it's meant to be.

Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies...Yet in all the houses and streets it's quiet, peaceful; of the fifty thousand people who live in town there is not one who would cry out or become loudly indignant. We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don't see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and only mute statistics protest: so many gone mad, so many buckets drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition... And this order is obviously necessary; obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a general hypnosis. At the door of every happy, contented man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him--illness, poverty, loss--and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen--and everything is fine.

Above them, one of the blackened television screens brightens, and there's an announcement about the in-flight movie. It's an animated film about a family of ducks, one that Hadley's actually see, and when Oliver groans, shes about to deny the whole thing. But then she twists around in her seat and eyes him critically. "There's nothing wrong with ducks," she tells him, and he rolls his eyes. "Talking ducks?" Hadley grins. "They sing, too." "Don't tell me," he says. "You've already seen it." She holds up two fingers. "Twice." "You do know it's meant for five-year-olds, right?" "Five- to eight-year-olds, thank you very much." "And how old are you again?" "Old enough to appreciate our web-footed friends." "You," he says, laughing in spite of himself, "are a mad as a hatter." "Wait a second," Hadley says in mock horror. "Is that a reference to a...cartoon?" No, genius. It's a reference to a famous work of literature by Lewis Carroll. But once again, I can see how well that American education is working for you.

the elephant in the room.” That we won’t say, simply, that it is men who are violent. It is men who take their violence out on masses of others. School shootings are carried out by young men. Mass murders. Gang warfare, murder-suicides and familicides and matricides and even genocides: all men. Always men. “Every commonly available domestic violence and official general violence statistic, and every anecdotal account about domestic and all other kinds of violence throughout the United States and around the world, point clearly to the fact that men almost monopolize all sectors of violence perpetration,” Sinclair wrote.

I believe neither in luck nor in destiny,” he declared. “I trust only the science of probabilities. I have studied mathematical statistics, combinatorial analysis, mass function, and random variables, and they have never held any surprises for me. You don’t seem fully to grasp the destabilizing effect that someone like you can have on someone like me.

odds don’t matter. The natural world defies statistics.

...the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere else.

Now, I’m not saying that we don’t need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?

People don't move into action because of statistics. They move because of their hearts. We're hardwired with empathy neurons, billions of them, and human beings are evolutionarily programmed to help one another.

No!" Kagan exclaims. “Every behavior has more than one cause. Don’t ever forget that! For every child who’s slow to warm up, yes, there will be statistically more high-reactives, but you can be slow to warm up because of how you spent the first three and a half years of your life! When writers and journalists talk, they want to see a one-to-one relationship—one behavior, one cause. But it’s really important that you see, for behaviors like slow-to-warm-up, shyness, impulsivity, there are many routes to that.

Do you think,” she says, the words emerging thickly, “we might have used up all our conversation last night?” “Not possible,” says Oliver, and the way he says it, his mouth turned up in a smile, his voice full of warmth, unwinds the knot in Hadley’s stomach. “We haven’t even gotten to the really important stuff yet.” “Like what?” she asks, trying to arrange her face in a way that disguises the relief she feels. “Like what’s so great about Dickens?” “Not at all,” he says. “More like the plight of koalas. Or the fact that Venice is sinking.” He pauses, waiting for this to register, and when Hadley says nothing, he slaps his knee for emphasis. “Sinking! The whole city! Can you believe it?” She frowns in mock seriousness. “That does sound pretty important.” “It is,” Oliver insists. “And don’t even get me started on the size of our carbon footprint after this trip. Or the difference between crocodiles and alligators. Or the longest recorded flight of a chicken.” “Please tell me you don’t actually know that.” “Thirteen seconds,” he says, leaning forward to look past her and out the window. “This is a total disaster. We’re nearly to Heathrow and we haven’t even properly discussed flying chickens.

Everything that we enjoy is a result of someone's hard work. Some work is visible and other work goes unseen, but both are equally important. Some people stop working as soon as they find a job. Regardless of the unemployment statistics, it is hard to find good people to work. Many people don't understand the difference between idle time and leisure time. Idle time amounts to wasting or stealing time; leisure time is earned. Procrastinating amounts to not working. Excellence is not luck; it is the result of a lot of hard work and practice. Hard work and practice make a person better at whatever he is doing.

What makes him successful is the way that he analyzes information. He is not just hunting for patterns. Instead, Bob combines his knowledge of statistics with his knowledge of basketball in order to identify meaningful relationships in the data.

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness.

Me?” Dean couldn’t have sounded more incredulous if he’d tried. “What else is there to say?” What was there to say? “I don’t care.” My breath was still ragged from running. I was saying this wrong. “Your father—it doesn’t change who you are.” “What I am,” he corrected. “And yes, it does. Why don’t you go ask Sloane what the statistics say about psychopathy and heredity? And then why don’t you ask her what they say about growing up in an environment where it’s the only thing you know.” “I don’t care about the statistics,” I said. “We’re partners. We work together. You knew I was going to find out. You could have told me.” “We’re not partners.” The words hurt me—and he meant for them to.

You don't like the way the study of an expensive drug for blood pressure is going? A nonissue - just stop the study before the results reach statistical significance.

I don't believe in the glory and the dream. I believe in statistics.

When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed.

Remember, if confronted by a librarian while looking for a book to check out, do not attempt to escape by climbing a tree. There are no trees in the library and the precious moments it will take you to look around and realize this will allow the librarian to strike. Don't become a statistic.

Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all.

Take an instance: the removal of the motto [In God We Trust] fetched out a clamor from the pulpit; little groups and small conventions of clergymen gathered themselves together all over the country, and one of these little groups, consisting of twenty-two ministers, put up a prodigious assertion unbacked by any quoted statistics and passed it unanimously in the form of a resolution: the assertion, to wit, that this is a Christian country. Why, Carnegie, so is hell. Those clergymen know that, inasmuch as "Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few — few — are they that enter in thereat" has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.

Politics is a great, albeit painful, example of social contract disengagement. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are making laws that they’re not required to follow or that don’t affect them, they’re engaging in behaviors that would result in most of us getting fired, divorced, or arrested. They’re espousing values that are rarely displayed in their behavior. And just watching them shame and blame each other is degrading for us. They’re not living up to their side of the social contract and voter turnout statistics show that we’re disengaging.

Even if you don’t have kids at home, morning time can be great for nurturing your relationship with your spouse, other family members, or your close friends. One of the most disturbing “statistics” I read while researching how people use their time was that dual-income couples could find only 12 minutes a day to talk with each other.

He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere else.

The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives. As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed. In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are: - Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person. - Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual. Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish: - Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day - Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves. The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

In the statistical gargon used in psychology, p refers to the probability that the difference you see between two groups (of introverts and extroverts, say, or males and females) could have occurred by chance. As a general rule, psychologists report a difference between two groups as 'significant' if the probability that it could have occurred by chance is 1 in 20, or less. The possibility of getting significant results by chance is a problem in any area of research, but it's particularly acute for sex differences research. Supppose, for example, you're a neuroscientist interested in what parts of the brain are involved in mind reading. You get fifteen participants into a scanner and ask them to guess the emotion of people in photographs. Since you have both males and females in your group, you rin a quick check to ensure that the two groups' brains respond in the same way. They do. What do you do next? Most likely, you publish your results without mentioning gender at all in your report (except to note the number of male and female participants). What you don't do is publish your findings with the title "No Sex Differences in Neural Circuitry Involved in Understanding Others' Minds." This is perfectly reasonable. After all, you weren't looking for gender difference and there were only small numbers of each sex in your study. But remember that even if males and females, overall, respond the same way on a task, five percent of studies investigating this question will throw up a "significant" difference between the sexes by chance. As Hines has explained, sex is "easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published." This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differences get published, but those that don't languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher's file drawer.

Steris,” he whispered, “I’ve been considering how to proceed once we decide how to infiltrate. I’ve thought about bringing you in with us, and I just don’t see that it’s feasible. I think it would be best if you stayed and watched the horses.” “Very well.” “No, really. Those are armed soldiers. I can’t even fathom how I’d feel if I brought you in there and something happened. You need to stay out here.” “Very well.” “It isn’t subject to—” Wax hesitated. “Wait. You’re all right with this?” “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked. “I barely have any sense of where to point a gun, and have hardly any capacity for sneaking—that’s really quite a scandalous talent if you think about it, Lord Waxillium. While I do believe that people tend to be safest when near you, riding into an enemy compound is stretching the issue. I’ll stay here.” Wax grinned in the darkness. “Steris, you’re a gem.” “What? Because I have a moderately healthy sense of self-preservation?” “Let’s just say that out in the Roughs, I was accustomed to people always wanting to try things beyond their capacity. And they always seemed determined to do it right when it was the most dangerous.” “Well, I shall endeavor to stay out of sight,” Steris said, “and not get captured.” “I doubt you need to worry about that all the way out here.” “Oh, I agree,” she said. “But that is the sort of statistical anomaly that plagues my life, so I’ll plan for it nonetheless.

Because we're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information." [...] "The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

The algorithm seemed to be really good at distinguishing the two rather similar canines; it turned out that it was simply labeling any picture with snow as containing a wolf. An example with more serious implications was described by Janelle Shane in her book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: an algorithm that was shown pictures of healthy skin and of skin cancer. The algorithm figured out the pattern: if there was a ruler in the photograph, it was cancer.7 If we don’t know why the algorithm is doing what it’s doing, we’re trusting our lives to a ruler detector.

My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word "average" having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is the average you still don't know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is- mean, median, or mode.

Probably the most startling story I've heard was about a freelance copy editor for a women's magazine who discovered that a writer-a famous "domestic diva"-had plagiarized a recipe. The poor freelancer mysteriously died the very same night she invited the writer to a dinner party at her house ... But I don't mean to worry you. Statistically speaking, I believe that the number of copy editors murdered by their authors is fairly low.

When I see two little Jewish old ladies giggling over coffee at a Manhattan diner, it makes me smile, because I hear my own mother’s laughter beneath theirs. Conversely, when I hear black “leaders” talking about “Jewish slave owners” I feel angry and disgusted, knowing that they’re inflaming people with lies and twisted history, as if all seven of the Jewish slave owners in the antebellum South, or however few there were, are responsible for the problems of African-Americans now. Those leaders are no better than their Jewish counterparts who spin statistics in marvelous ways to make African-Americans look like savages, criminals, drags on society, and “animals” (a word quite popular when used to describe blacks these days). I don’t belong to any of those groups. I belong to the world of one God, one people.

Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.

A modern fad which has gained widespread acceptance amongst the semi-educated who wish to appear secular is the practice of meditation. They proclaim with an air of smug superiority, ‘Main mandir-vandir nahin jaata, meditate karta hoon (I don’t go to temples or other such places, I meditate).’ The exercise involves sitting lotus-pose (padma asana), regulating one’s breathing and making your mind go blank to prevent it from ‘jumping about like monkeys’ from one (thought) branch to another. This intense concentration awakens the kundalini serpent coiled at the base of the spine. It travels upwards through chakras (circles) till it reaches its destination in the cranium. Then the kundalini is fully jaagrit (roused) and the person is assured to have reached his goal. What does meditation achieve? The usual answer is ‘peace of mind’. If you probe further, ‘and what does peace of mind achieve?’, you will get no answer because there is none. Peace of mind is a sterile concept which achieves nothing. The exercise may be justified as therapy for those with disturbed minds or those suffering from hypertension, but there is no evidence to prove that it enhances creativity. On the contrary it can be established by statistical data that all the great works of art, literature, science and music were works of highly agitated minds, at times minds on the verge of collapse. Allama Iqbal’s short prayer is pertinent: Khuda tujhey kisee toofaan say aashna kar dey Keh terey beher kee maujon mein iztiraab naheen (May God bring a storm in your life, There is no agitation in the waves of your life’s ocean.)

You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.

Some people you don't give up on. Not because you can tell what they'll be or what will happen. Not because of that. It's because something inside you insists that you shouldn't---something knows more or knows better, stubbornly holds its ground, even while the the rest of the world and a million statistics and your own rational brain buzzes around you, chanting that you're a fool. And maybe they're right. Maybe you ARE a fool. But what if you're not? Can you give up without knowing if that voice was right all along? Where's the peace in that?

Just in time to pick up the shells after the shoot-out is over, I'm sure. I've known a few analysts and number crunchers. You work with paper, computers, pore over printouts-charts, graphs, scatter plots but you don't deal with people. You're more comfortable with bits and bytes," Caston tilted his head. "John Henry did beat the steam drill once. Maybe you were sleeping in when the information age dawned. Today, technology spans borders. It watches. It hears. It registers patterns, small statistical perturbations, and if we're willing to pay attention--" "It can hear, but it can't listen. It can watch, but it can't observe And it sure as hell can't converse with the men and women we've got to deal with. There's no substitute for that, goddammit.

It was Joseph Overton, an American lawyer, who first explained the mechanisms of uppercase Politics in the 1990s. He began with a simple question: Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously? Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable. This window of acceptability is populated by schemes that are rubber-stamped by the experts, tallied up by statistics services, and have good odds of making it into the law books.

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That’s kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God’s math works! Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don’t have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).

Be wary, though, of the way news media use the word “significant,” because to statisticians it doesn’t mean “noteworthy.” In statistics, the word “significant” means that the results passed mathematical tests such as t-tests, chi-square tests, regression, and principal components analysis (there are hundreds). Statistical significance tests quantify how easily pure chance can explain the results. With a very large number of observations, even small differences that are trivial in magnitude can be beyond what our models of change and randomness can explain. These tests don’t know what’s noteworthy and what’s not—that’s a human judgment.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low‐IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high‐IQ people.

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

In 90% of cases, you can start with one of the two most effective ways to open a speech: ask a question or start with a story. Our brain doesn’t remember what we hear. It remembers only what we “see” or imagine while we listen. You can remember stories. Everything else is quickly forgotten. Smell is the most powerful sense out of 4 to immerse audience members into a scene. Every sentence either helps to drive your point home, or it detracts from clarity. There is no middle point. If you don’t have a foundational phrase in your speech, it means that your message is not clear enough to you, and if it’s not clear to you, there is no way it will be clear to your audience. Share your failures first. Show your audience members that you are not any better, smarter or more talented than they are. You are not an actor, you are a speaker. The main skill of an actor is to play a role; to be someone else. Your main skill as a speaker is to be yourself. People will forgive you for anything except for being boring. Speaking without passion is boring. If you are not excited about what you are talking about, how can you expect your audience to be excited? Never hide behind a lectern or a table. Your audience needs to see 100% of your body. Speak slowly and people will consider you to be a thoughtful and clever person. Leaders don’t talk much, but each word holds a lot of meaning and value. You always speak to only one person. Have a conversation directly with one person, look him or her in the eye. After you have logically completed one idea, which usually is 10-20 seconds, scan the audience and then stop your eyes on another person. Repeat this process again. Cover the entire room with eye contact. When you scan the audience and pick people for eye contact, pick positive people more often. When you pause, your audience thinks about your message and reflects. Pausing builds an audiences’ confidence. If you don’t pause, your audience doesn’t have time to digest what you've told them and hence, they will not remember a word of what you've said. Pause before and after you make an important point and stand still. During this pause, people think about your words and your message sinks in. After you make an important point and stand still. During this pause, people think about your words and your message sinks in. Speakers use filler words when they don’t know what to say, but they feel uncomfortable with silence. Have you ever seen a speaker who went on stage with a piece of paper and notes? Have you ever been one of these speakers? When people see you with paper in your hands, they instantly think, “This speaker is not sincere. He has a script and will talk according to the script.” The best speeches are not written, they are rewritten. Bad speakers create a 10 minutes speech and deliver it in 7 minutes. Great speakers create a 5 minute speech and deliver it in 7 minutes. Explain your ideas in a simple manner, so that the average 12-year-old child can understand the concept. Good speakers and experts can always explain the most complex ideas with very simple words. Stories evoke emotions. Factual information conveys logic. Emotions are far more important in a speech than logic. If you're considering whether to use statistics or a story, use a story. PowerPoint is for pictures not for words. Use as few words on the slide as possible. Never learn your speech word for word. Just rehearse it enough times to internalize the flow. If you watch a video of your speech, you can triple the pace of your development as a speaker. Make videos a habit. Meaningless words and clichés neither convey value nor information. Avoid them. Never apologize on stage. If people need to put in a lot of effort to understand you they simply won’t listen. On the other hand if you use very simple language you will connect with the audience and your speech will be remembered.

Girls mature faster than boys, cost more to raise, and statistics show that the old saw about girls not knowing about money and figures is a myth. Girls start to outspend boys before puberty—and they manage to maintain this lead until death or an ugly credit manager, whichever comes first. Males are born with a closed fist. Girls are born with the left hand cramped in a position the size of an American Express card. Whenever a girl sees a sign reading, “Sale, Going Out of Business, Liquidation,” saliva begins to form in her mouth, the palms of her hands perspire and the pituitary gland says, “Go, Mama.” In the male, it is quite a different story. He has a gland that follows a muscle from the right arm down to the base of his billfold pocket. It's called “cheap.” Girls can slam a door louder, beg longer, turn tears on and off like a faucet, and invented the term, “You don't trust me.” So much for “sugar and spice and everything nice” and “snips and snails and puppydog tails.

And I thought how many satisfied, happy people really do exist in this world! And what a powerful force they are! Just take a look at this life of ours and you will see the arrogance and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak. Everywhere there's unspeakable poverty, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy and stupid lies... And yet peace and quiet reign in every house and street. Out of fifty thousand people you won't find one who is prepared to shout out loud and make a strong protest. We see people buying food in the market, eating during the day, sleeping at night-time, talking nonsense, marrying, growing old and then contentedly carting their dead off to the cemetery. But we don't hear or see those who suffer: the real tragedies of life are enacted somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is calm and peaceful and the only protest comes from statistics - and they can't talk. Figures show that so many went mad, so many bottles of vodka were emptied, so many children died from malnutrition. And clearly this kind of system is what people need. It,s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand with a hammer at the door of every contented man, continually banging on it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at that time, sooner or later life will show him its claws and disaster will overtake him in the form of illness, poverty, bereavement and there will be no one to hear or see him. But there isn't anyone holding a hammer, so our happy man goes his own sweet way and is only gently ruffled by life's trivial cares, as an aspen is ruffled by the breeze. All's well as far as he's concerned

The Christian writer will feel that in the greatest depth of vision, moral judgment will be implicit, and that when we are invited to represent the country according to survey, what we are asked to do is to separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper. We are asked to form our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute. For many this may be a convenience, since we don't live in an age of settled belief; but it cannot be a convenience, it cannot even be possible, for the writer who is a Catholic. He will feel that any long-continued service to it will produce a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism and a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction. The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is is what can be determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.

In my opinion, defining intelligence is much like defining beauty, and I don’t mean that it’s in the eye of the beholder. To illustrate, let’s say that you are the only beholder, and your word is final. Would you be able to choose the 1000 most beautiful women in the country? And if that sounds impossible, consider this: Say you’re now looking at your picks. Could you compare them to each other and say which one is more beautiful? For example, who is more beautiful— Katie Holmes or Angelina Jolie? How about Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones? I think intelligence is like this. So many factors are involved that attempts to measure it are useless. Not that IQ tests are useless. Far from it. Good tests work: They measure a variety of mental abilities, and the best tests do it well. But they don’t measure intelligence itself.

The flow is constant,” Alfonse said. “Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you, they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess. Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic. 　　Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement that required no effort was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed. What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart’ 　　Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen: 　　First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she will start to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort. 　　Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.) 　　Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure. 　　  　　What to say instead: ‘You really worked hard’ 　　What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research shows a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said,“I’m so proud of you. You’re so smart. They should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have really studied hard”. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

Campbell’s slideshow lists grim domestic violence statistic after statistic: second leading cause of death for African American women, third leading cause of death for native women, seventh leading cause of death for Caucasian women. Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 That figure does not count children. And it does not count the abusers who kill themselves after killing their partners, murder-suicides we see daily in the newspaper. And it does not count same-sex relationships where one or the other partner might not be “out.” And it does not count other family members, like sisters, aunts, grandmothers, who are often killed alongside the primary victim. And it does not count innocent bystanders: the twenty-six churchgoers in Texas, say, after a son-in-law has gone to a service to target his mother-in-law, or the two spa employees in Wisconsin killed alongside their client by her ex. The list is endless. And it does not count the jurisdictions who do not report their homicides, since homicide reporting is voluntary through the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reporting Data. So how many people are killed as a result of domestic violence each year? The bystanders, the other family members, the perpetrators’ suicides? The victims who just can’t take it anymore and kill themselves? The accidents that turn out not to be accidents at all, victims pushed out of cars and from cliffs or driven into trees. Tragedies forever uncategorized.

We live in a world that seems increasingly beyond our control. Our livelihoods are at the whim of globalized forces. The problems that we face—economic, environmental, and so on—cannot be solved by our individual actions. Our politicians are distant and unresponsive to our desires. A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don’t try too much in life, if we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable. For this reason we become attracted to certain narratives: it is genetics that determines much of what we do; we are just products of our times; the individual is just a myth; human behavior can be reduced to statistical trends.

He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles.

I was walking on campus when I saw the statistic on the front page of a newspaper: one in four women, one in five? I don’t remember, it was just too many, too many women on campus had been sexually assaulted. But what got me was the graphic, rows of woman symbols, the kind you see on bathroom signs, across the entire page, all gray, with one in five inked red. I saw these red figures breathing, a little hallucination. My whole life had warped below the weight of the assault, and if you took that damage and multiplied it by each red figure, the magnitude was staggering. Where were they? I looked around campus, girls walking with earmuffs, black leggings, teal backpacks. If our bodies were literally painted red, we’d have red bodies all over this quad. I wanted to shake the paper in people’s faces. This was not normal. It was an epidemic, a crisis. How could you see this headline and keep walking? We’d deadened to the severity, too familiar a story. But this story was not old to me yet. A word came to my mind, another. I remember, after learning of the third suicide at school, people shook their heads in resignation, I can’t believe there’s been another. The shock had dimmed. No longer a bang, but an ache. If kids getting killed by trains became normalized, anything could. This was no longer a fight against my rapist, it was a fight to be humanized. I had to hold on to my story, figure out how to make myself heard. If I didn’t break out, I’d become a statistic. Another red figure in a grid.

As it happens, there’s a way of presenting data, called the funnel plot, that indicates whether or not the scientific literature is biased in this way.15 (If statistics don’t excite you, feel free to skip straight to the probably unsurprising conclusion in the last sentence of this paragraph.) You plot the data points from all your studies according to the effect sizes, running along the horizontal axis, and the sample size (roughly)16 running up the vertical axis. Why do this? The results from very large studies, being more “precise,” should tend to cluster close to the “true” size of the effect. Smaller studies by contrast, being subject to more random error because of their small, idiosyncratic samples, will be scattered over a wider range of effect sizes. Some small studies will greatly overestimate a difference; others will greatly underestimate it (or even “flip” it in the wrong direction). The next part is simple but brilliant. If there isn’t publication bias toward reports of greater male risk taking, these over- and underestimates of the sex difference should be symmetrical around the “true” value indicated by the very large studies. This, with quite a bit of imagination, will make the plot of the data look like an upside-down funnel. (Personally, my vote would have been to call it the candlestick plot, but I wasn’t consulted.) But if there is bias, then there will be an empty area in the plot where the smaller samples that underestimated the difference, found no differences, or yielded greater female risk taking should be. In other words, the overestimates of male risk taking get published, but various kinds of “underestimates” do not. When Nelson plotted the data she’d been examining, this is exactly what she found: “Confirmation bias is strongly indicated.”17 This

The English word Atonement comes from the ancient Hebrew word kaphar, which means to cover. When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and discovered their nakedness in the Garden of Eden, God sent Jesus to make coats of skins to cover them. Coats of skins don’t grow on trees. They had to be made from an animal, which meant an animal had to be killed. Perhaps that was the very first animal sacrifice. Because of that sacrifice, Adam and Eve were covered physically. In the same way, through Jesus’ sacrifice we are also covered emotionally and spiritually. When Adam and Eve left the garden, the only things they could take to remind them of Eden were the coats of skins. The one physical thing we take with us out of the temple to remind us of that heavenly place is a similar covering. The garment reminds us of our covenants, protects us, and even promotes modesty. However, it is also a powerful and personal symbol of the Atonement—a continuous reminder both night and day that because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we are covered. (I am indebted to Guinevere Woolstenhulme, a religion teacher at BYU, for insights about kaphar.) Jesus covers us (see Alma 7) when we feel worthless and inadequate. Christ referred to himself as “Alpha and Omega” (3 Nephi 9:18). Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Christ is surely the beginning and the end. Those who study statistics learn that the letter alpha is used to represent the level of significance in a research study. Jesus is also the one who gives value and significance to everything. Robert L. Millet writes, “In a world that offers flimsy and fleeting remedies for mortal despair, Jesus comes to us in our moments of need with a ‘more excellent hope’ (Ether 12:32)” (Grace Works, 62). Jesus covers us when we feel lost and discouraged. Christ referred to Himself as the “light” (3 Nephi 18:16). He doesn’t always clear the path, but He does illuminate it. Along with being the light, He also lightens our loads. “For my yoke is easy,” He said, “and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). He doesn’t always take burdens away from us, but He strengthens us for the task of carrying them and promises they will be for our good. Jesus covers us when we feel abused and hurt. Joseph Smith taught that because Christ met the demands of justice, all injustices will be made right for the faithful in the eternal scheme of things (see Teachings, 296). Marie K. Hafen has said, “The gospel of Jesus Christ was not given us to prevent our pain. The gospel was given us to heal our pain” (“Eve Heard All These Things,” 27). Jesus covers us when we feel defenseless and abandoned. Christ referred to Himself as our “advocate” (D&C 29:5): one who believes in us and stands up to defend us. We read, “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler” (Psalm 18:2). A buckler is a shield used to divert blows. Jesus doesn’t always protect us from unpleasant consequences of illness or the choices of others, since they are all part of what we are here on earth to experience. However, He does shield us from fear in those dark times and delivers us from having to face those difficulties alone. … We’ve already learned that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as Atonement means “to cover.” In Arabic or Aramaic, the verb meaning to atone is kafat, which means “to embrace.” Not only can we be covered, helped, and comforted by the Savior, but we can be “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love” (2 Nephi 1:15). We can be “clasped in the arms of Jesus” (Mormon 5:11). In our day the Savior has said, “Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in the arms of my love” (D&C 6:20). (Brad Wilcox, The Continuous Atonement, pp. 47-49, 60).

Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’ And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run. Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms – which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics – say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.

Doug, you have to prepare yourself. You have to prepare Sarah. It won’t be long before they have some answers. You have to get ready, Doug.’‘Jesus, Pete,’ yelled Doug. ‘Don’t you think I’ve fucking been ready every day for the last four months? Every hour of every day for the last four months? I can’t breathe in without being ready. I know all those statistics. They quoted them at me when they wanted me to go home. If a kid isn’t found within the first twenty-four hours there’s a chance he will never be found alive. I know that, Pete. Don’t you think I fucking know that? Every time that fucking phone rings I can see Sarah’s heart hit her feet. We’re ready, Pete. We’ve been ready since the day we lost him. We’re ready but we will never be ready. There is no way to be ready for this. No way . . .’Doug had sunk into silence and all Pete had heard was his ragged desperate breathing on the other end of the phone. Finally he said, ‘I can’t tell her, Pete. I can’t tell her until they know for sure. She’s hanging on by a thread, Pete, and I can’t lose her as well. Tell me when they know for sure and then I’ll tell her.’ His voice trailed off, all the anger leaving him exhausted and trembling.

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself. Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self." "The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude." Officially, Asperger's disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger's is now grouped under the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.

the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them. What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those roadblocks you keep running into? What are those issues that won’t go away and make you wonder why you keep on believing at all? These are questions I asked on a survey I gave on my blog in the summer of 2013. Nothing fancy. I just asked some questions and waited to see what would happen. In the days to come, I was overwhelmed with comments and e-mails from readers, many anonymous, with bracingly honest answers often expressed through the tears of relentless and unnerving personal suffering. I didn’t do a statistical analysis (who has the time, plus I don’t know how), but the responses fell into five categories.         1.        The Bible portrays God as violent, reactive, vengeful, bloodthirsty, immoral, mean, and petty.         2.        The Bible and science collide on too many things to think that the Bible has anything to say to us today about the big questions of life.         3.        In the face of injustice and heinous suffering in the world, God seems disinterested or perhaps unable to do anything about it.         4.        In our ever-shrinking world, it is very difficult to hold on to any notion that Christianity is the only path to God.         5.        Christians treat each other so badly and in such harmful ways that it calls into question the validity of Christianity—or even whether God exists. These five categories struck me as exactly right—at least, they match up with my experience. And I’d bet good money they resonate with a lot of us. All five categories have one big thing in common: “Faith in God no longer makes sense to me.” Understanding, correct thinking, knowing what you believe—these were once true of their faith, but no longer are. Because life happened. A faith that promises to provide firm answers and relieve our doubt is a faith that will not hold up to the challenges and tragedies of life. Only deep trust can hold up.

I have a proposition for you,” she said, trying for a businesslike tone. “A very sensible one. You see—” She paused to clear her throat. “I’ve been thinking about your problem.” “What problem?” Cam played lightly with the folds of her skirts, watching her face alertly. “Your good-luck curse. I know how to get rid of it. You should marry into a family with very, very bad luck. A family with expensive problems. And then you won’t have to be embarrassed about having so much money, because it will flow out nearly as fast as it comes in.” “Very sensible.” Cam took her shaking hand in his, pressed it between his warm palms. And touched his foot to her rapidly tapping one. “Hummingbird,” he whispered, “you don’t have to be nervous with me.” Gathering her courage, Amelia blurted out, “I want your ring. I want never to take it off again. I want to be your romni forever”— she paused with a quick, abashed smile—“ whatever that is.” “My bride. My wife.” Amelia froze in a moment of throat-clenching delight as she felt him slide the gold ring onto her finger, easing it to the base. “When we were with Leo, tonight,” she said scratchily, “I knew exactly how he felt about losing Laura. He told me once that I couldn’t understand unless I had loved someone that way. He was right. And tonight, as I watched you with him … I knew what I would think at the very last moment of my life.” His thumb smoothed over the tender surface of her knuckle. “Yes, love?” “I would think,” she continued, “‘ Oh, if I could have just one more day with Cam. I would fit a lifetime into those few hours.’” “Not necessary,” he assured her gently. “Statistically speaking, we’ll have at least ten, fifteen thousand days to spend together.” “I don’t want to be apart from you for even one of them.” Cam cupped her small, serious face in his hands, his thumbs skimming the trace of tears beneath her eyes. His gaze caressed her. “Are we to live in sin, love, or will you finally agree to marry me?” “Yes. Yes. I’ll marry you. Although … I still can’t promise to obey you.” Cam laughed quietly. “We’ll manage around that. If you’ll at least promise to love me.” Amelia gripped his wrists, his pulse steady and strong beneath her fingertips. “Oh, I do love you, you’re—” “I love you, too.” “— my fate. You’re everything I—” She would have said more, if he had not pulled her head to his, kissing her with hard, thrilling pressure.