Kathryn Schulz Quote

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them, the writer Louis Menand observed. …The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.