Which writer remarked “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write”?
Answers
In 1903, in his book Mankind in the Making, the writer H. G. Wells noted that: “The great body of physical science … [is] only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen … it is necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.”1
The above is a fairly tortuous passage that was shortened and simplified in 1951 by Samuel Wilks when he remarked, during his presidential address to the American Statistical Association, that: “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.”
It is certainly a snappier quote. However, unlike Wells's original, it does require the reader to understand the phrase “statistical thinking”.
Statistical thinking – as Wilks might have thought of it – can be broken down into six core concepts: expectation and variance – which encompass the “averages and maxima and minima” that Wells refers to – plus distribution, probability, risk and correlation.