John Tukey Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

John Tukey
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

John Tukey
An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question.

John Tukey
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.

John Tukey
Predictions, prophecies, and perhaps even guidance — those who suggested this title to me must have hoped for such — even though occasional indulgences in such actions by statisticians has undoubtedly contributed to the characterization of a statistician as a man who draws straight lines from insufficient data to foregone conclusions!

John Tukey
If data analysis is to be well done, much of it must be a matter of judgment, and "theory" whether statistical or non-statistical, will have to guide, not command.

John Tukey
(The experimental statistician dare not shrink from the war cry of the analyst "Only a fool would use it, but it's better than we used to use!")

John Tukey
Teaching data analysis is not easy, and the time allowed is always far from sufficient.

John Tukey
A sort of question that is inevitable is: "someone taught my students exploratory, and now (boo hoo) they want me to tell them how to assess significance or confidence for all these unusual functions of the data. (Oh, what can we do?)" To this there is an easy answer: TEACH them the JACKKNIFE.

John Tukey
To be able to say that "if we change our point of view in the following way... things are simpler" is always a gain.

John Tukey
The worst, i.e., most dangerous, feature of "accepting the null hypothesis" is the giving up of explicit uncertainty.... Mathematics can sometimes be put in such black-and-white terms, but our knowledge or belief about the external world never can.

John Tukey
Just as there is an applied mathematics of games, genetics, and mechanics, so there should be an applied mathematics (at least in terms of concepts, perhaps with techniques and operations) of the applications of mathematics. When there is, mathematicians will be able to teach the applications of mathematics.

John Tukey