Quotes About Accuracy

Before we can be confident we are reading the Bible accurately, we need to understand what assumptions and values we project onto the Bible:

I'm always right. I'm quite uneasy at being always right so often.

I like accuracy for its own sake, strive after it myself, and am sometimes guilty of forcing it upon others. -Bunny

We have to get the facts right as best as we can. Otherwise, history becomes what Du Bois referred to as "lies agreed upon.

In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.

The day was counting up its birds and never got the answer right.

You don't have to be a beer drinker to play darts, but it helps.

98% of all statistics are made up.

Some folks never exaggerate — they just remember big.

Up to five goals is journalism. After that, it becomes statistics.

Don't underestimate anyone bcz a broken clock will show true time twice in a day.

I have never intentionally provided false and misleading information to the NCAA.

Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to.

The bottom line is: Polls can be provocative, informative, fun or maddening. But as we move into 2020, it's important to be mindful that news organizations or those interpreting their polling results may not always be providing context that would allow us to have the most complete and accurate picture of the public's mood at a given moment.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

Accurate diagnostics are key to enabling successful public health measures.

The papers, you know, they're always gonna just make stuff up. They think it's in the public interest.

They may well say not only is this not true, but I will put in an injunction to prevent publication. No, stories don't go in unless I'm convinced by the people who write them that they're true. And if I'm wrong, then so be it.

The problem is that with blogging, the model is publish first, maybe fact-check later. In newspapers, the model is you fact check first and then publish. But those models are merging.

If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked.

Every book has mistakes in them, every one. There's never been a book published without mistakes.

One thing that we learned that we published on our blog post is that uniformly, men lie about their height by almost exactly two inches. So if you look at a plot of census bureau data on the distribution of men's heights in the U.S. and you plot men's heights on OKCupid, it is exactly shifted two inches to the left.

In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.