Quotes About Accuracy

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite - we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.

Of course, the test difficulty depends on what you're doing, and on how you're doing it. I'm constantly asking "How much would I have to screw this up to write an incorrect function that passes these simple tests?" Occasionally the answer is "Not much," so I'll throw the code away and start over. It was probably perfect code, but that's not good enough.

Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.

Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.

It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.

I'm not going to let people get away with either a dishonest or inaccurate premise to what we're talking about because I think that does the viewer a disturbance.

If I get something wrong on air, I get 1,000 emails correcting me instantly, and most of our story suggestions come from viewers.

When you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it's a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it's a cloudy day. I should be able to tell my viewers, 'Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right,' and not have to say, 'Well, you decide.' Then it would be like I'm an idiot.

On the whole, GPS is fine but you still need maps because the information available can be different to what's on the ground. You need to be vigilant for obstacles.

You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

Virtually everything that gets printed about me is wrong anyway, so it doesn't really matter what you say.

What I say is that there are not half a dozen papers in the United States which tamper with the news, which publish what they know to be false. But if I thought I had done no better than that, I would be ashamed to own a paper. You have to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.

Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

In the world in which we live, truth is an ancillary virtue, but it shouldn't be.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.

I am the bookkeeper, after all, and as a rule the numbers don't behave too badly.

But correct and right were two different things. As were facts and truth.