Quotes About Data

Beta is our everyday waking state. When we're in beta, the thinking brain, or neocortex, is processing all of the incoming sensory data and creating meaning between our outer and inner worlds.

The good news about Cochrane is that most of their conclusions are conservative. Even when data is sufficient for meta-analyses, they often hold back on making recommendations.

Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

The truth is creepier. It's not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.

After studying all the hidden data—the stuff that Facebook doesn't release to the public—the company's scientists reached a definite conclusion. They wrote: "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," and "if left unchecked," the site would continue to pump its users with "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it's always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

Irving didn't want this to be true—it contradicted his own published work—but he told me, "One thing I do pride myself on is looking at the data, and allowing my mind to be changed when the data's different than I expected.

The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

We are not at the same place we were in 1973. This country today is drifting, moving steadily towards the pro-life position because the data is with us.

In this regard it is perhaps appropriate to suggest instead that science fiction is the literature where we keep the beautiful ideas and throw out the data . . . namely, where we are free to conjure new realities that conform to our ideas. So it is that I am often unimpressed when people claim that science fiction anticipates science. It doesn't. The imagination of the natural world far exceeds that of even the most gifted science fiction writer.

Science] presupposes as data principles that are themselves thoroughly lacking in actual rationality. In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not studied.

A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space.

You can't take something off the Internet — it's like taking pee out of a pool.

Computers, huh? I've heard it all boils down to just a bunch of ones and zeroes.... I don't know how that enables me to see naked women, but however it works, God bless you guys.

Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth.

Do files get embarrassed when they're unzipped?

All so-called 'quantitative' data, when scrutinized, turn out to be composites of 'qualitative' – i.e., contextually located and indexical – interpretations produced by situated researchers, coders, government officials and others. The

Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.

While many big-data providers do their best to de-identify individuals from human-subject data sets, the risk of re-identification is very real.

Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn't trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

'Sleep' is a project I've been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data.