To Consult The Statistician After An Experiment

Modern Statisticians Are Familiar With The Notion That Any Finite Body Of Data Contains Only A Limited Amount Of Information On Any Point Under Examination; That This Limit Is Set By The Nature Of The Data Themselves, And Cannot Be Increased By Any Amount Of Ingenuity Expended In Their Statistical Examination: That The Statistician's Task, In Fact, Is Limited To The Extraction Of The Whole Of The Available Information On Any Particular Issue.

To Consult The Statistician After An Experiment Is Finished Is Often Merely To Ask Him To Conduct A Post Mortem Examination. He Can Perhaps Say What The Experiment Died Of.

The Best Causes Tend To Attract To Their Support The Worst Arguments, Which Seems To Be Equally True In The Intellectual And In The Moral Sense.

Natural Selection Is A Mechanism For Generating An Exceedingly High Degree Of Improbability.

The Tendency Of Modern Scientific Teaching Is To Neglect The Great Books, To Lay Far Too Much Stress Upon Relatively Unimportant Modern Work, And To Present Masses Of Detail Of Doubtful Truth And Questionable Weight In Such A Way As To Obscure Principles.