Quotes About Data

Amending the 'data', or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial 'data' cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.

If this is the Information Age, what are we so informed about?

But it's crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that's now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.

if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the 'tribal' stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety.25 But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker's conclusions.

Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin 's works for numbers and equations.

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

These data actually construct the fiction of a national economy when really there is no such thing; in Marx's terms, it is a fetish construct.

in real statistical analyses the computer takes over the tedium of arithmetic juggling.

Raw data, like raw potatoes, usually require cleaning before use. Ronald A. Thisted

it is easy to lie with statistics, but easier to lie without them'.

When you do change the circumstances under which you collect the data—when you intervene—the data are said to be "experimental." Experimental data are particularly important, because they can give you information about the counterfactuals mentioned in chapter

If you change the way data are used, it is perhaps hardly surprising that behavior in collecting those data changes—a feedback phenomenon of the kind we examine in detail in chapter

All this means, first, is that it's necessary to be very clear about what question you are asking, and, second, that whether data are dark or not will depend on that question. Trite though it may sound, the data you need to collect, the analysis you will undertake, and the answer you will get depend on what you want to know.

These days you can't do a goddamn thing online without leaving footprints.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

There might never be that moment when everyone says, "Oh my God, big data is awful."

God only knows what else is on the web about me.

I want to know what good is a web search engine that returns 324,909,188 'matches' to my key word. That's like saying, "Good news, we've located the product you're looking for. It's on Earth.

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

There is no good way of measuring poverty.

Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.

Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.