 Financial Jokes and Anecdotes
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Statisticians Jokes
In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had
to fall back on lies.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong.
It's like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked
to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. "Well"
he explained, "I have to put some horse-meat in too.
But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit." [DARREL
HUFF, How to lie with statistics]
A statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise
line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.
A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet
in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.
ph2008@mail.bris.ac.uk (CJ. Bradfield)
There was this statistics student who, when driving his car,
would always accelerate hard before coming to any junction,
whizz straight over it , then slow down again once he'd got
over it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably
unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so
fast over junctions. The statistics student replied, "Well,
statistically speaking, you are far more likely to have an
accident at a junction, so I just make sure that I spend less
time there."
quee0076@sable.ox.ac.uk (Marky Mark)
A famous statistician would never travel by airplane, because
he had studied air travel and estimated the probability of
there being a bomb on any given flight was 1 in a million,
and he was not prepared to accept these odds. One day a colleague
met him at a conference far from home. "How did you get
here, by train?" "No, I flew" "What about
your the possibiltiy of a bomb?" Well, I began thinking
that if the odds of one bomb are 1:million, then the odds
of TWO bombs are (1/1,000,000) x (1/1,000,000). This is a
very, very small probability, which I can accept. So, now
I bring my own bomb along!"
pclarke@waite.adelaide.edu.au (Philip Clarke)
The difference between an economist and a statistician: people
believe what economists say about the future, but not what
statisticians say about the past.
You can't prove everything with statistics, but you can always
find something good (or bad) to say.
The Dictionary: what mathematics professors say and what
they mean by it
Clearly: I don't want to write down all the "in-between"
steps.
Trivial: If I have to show you how to do this, you're
in the wrong class.
It can easily be shown: No more than four hours are
needed to prove it.
Check for yoursel: This is the boring part of the proof,
so you can do it on your own time.
Hint: The hardest of several possible ways to do a
proof.
Brute force: Four special cases, three counting arguments
and two long inductions.
Elegant proof: Requires no previous knowledge of the
subject matter and is less than ten lines long.
Similarly: At least one line of the proof of this case
is the same as before.
Two line proof: I'll leave out everything but the conclusion,
you can't question 'em if you can't see 'em.
Briefly: I'm running out of time, so I'll just write
and talk faster.
Proceed formally: Manipulate symbols by the rules without
any hint of their true meaning.
Proof omitted: Trust me, It's true.
David Shay's collection
More Jokes:
Stock Market Economists Statisticians
Murthy's Laws
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