Quotes About Accuracy

The media these days are not so much interested in saying things truthfully without distortion, without misrepresentation, without ridicule.

Hyperbolic headlines always attract more attention than mundane truths.

It is easy to be accurate if you have the freedom to be complicated, and it is very easy to be simple if you have the freedom to shade the truth. What's hard is to be simple and very accurate, and that takes work to figure out what are the simple truths that are going to sustain your case.

I'm a mathematician. I can trade in facts about false positives and absolute truths about accuracy and statistics with complete confidence.

We tune in to news companies for them to give us some sense of grounded assessment of what the truth is.

I take no pleasure in the fact that the scientific predictions I've relayed to popular audiences turn out to be true.

We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.

You have to say what comes into your head, and sometimes the wrong words come, in the wrong order or I'd make prophecies which immediately turned out to be wrong.

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.

The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image.

Not to say there's not good TV out there, but I think TV is better when it accurately reflects the world as it is.

Playing a cop on TV and working closely with actual cops on set, I do think the media does a disservice to our first responders.

The reason that I'm so fast at what I do is - I'm not saying that I'm getting stories that nobody else has - the difference is that if a tip goes out to five people, and I know that it's a reliable source, I just tweet it out. If you're at a respectable news organization, that would be considered irresponsible.

If I tweet out 'Trumpcare will cause 22 million people to lose coverage,' I try to make sure that it is as accurate as it can be.

Just because someone says something, whether it's at the podium during the briefing or the president tweets, I can't always assume that's factual. That's insane. We have to be very quick on our toes in fact checking.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day; that doesn't mean you should run out and buy one.

So as soon as you want something to happen you begin skewing the data to support it. Our stuff is invaluable to decision-makers precisely because we have no ax to grind.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.

administrative purpose usually outruns the facts. Indeed the administrative official's ardor for facts usually begins when he wants to change the facts!

Birth dates and bathroom scales tell more truth than I want to know.

We're not policy people and we don't want to be policy people. All we're interested in, as social scientists, is data that accurately represents reality.