Quotes About Data

You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.

Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.

We can now with Google Glasses record everything around us, and we can make sure that nothing is ever forgotten because everything is stored somewhere in Google servers or somewhere else.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.

In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'

It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.

The real power of mass data collection lies in the hand-tailored algorithms capable of sifting, sorting, and identifying patterns within the data itself. When enough information is collected over time, governments and corporations can use or abuse those patterns to predict future human behavior.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material.

I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don't think there's ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us - who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we're buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.

Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products - fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they're relatively undifferentiated.

Many of us now expect our online activities to be recorded and analyzed, but we assume the physical spaces we inhabit are different. The data broker industry doesn't see it that way. To them, even the act of walking down the street is a legitimate data set to be captured, catalogued, and exploited.

mente y su propio cerebro. Debe usarlo y tomar sus propias decisiones. Si necesita datos o información de otras personas para poder tomar decisiones, tal y como probablemente requerirá en muchas ocasiones, debe adquirir estos datos u obtener la información que necesita discretamente, sin revelar su propósito.

More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.

More data means more information, but it also means more false information.

The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.

Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

If you want to accelerate someone's death, give him a personal doctor. I don't mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.

Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise.

a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.