Quotes About Accuracy

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.

Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge.

Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand.

In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.

Imagine a society in which every speech in the Congressional Record, every television commercial, every sermon had an accompanying error bar or its equivalent.

Cada vez que un estudio científico presenta algunos datos, va acompañado de un margen de error: un recordatorio discreto pero insistente de que ningún conocimiento es completo o perfecto.

it didn't matter how hard you could swing a sword, if you couldn't hit anything.

A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.

Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what's going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.

Bad spelling can be lethal.

Interesting thing, these fellows never seem to get the idea of perspective-' The Bursar thought, or received the thought: that's because perspective is a lie. If I know a pond is round then why should I draw it oval? I will draw it round because round is true. Why should my brush lie to you just because my eye lies to me?

all reputable falconers agreed that for hunting purposes the only way you could reliably bring down prey with a wowhawk was by using it in a slingshot.

Quimby was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb "The pen is mightier than the sword," and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase "only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.

There may be a lot of things I'm not good at, thought Vimes, but at least I don't treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey…

MARY: Renaissance, not medieval. Most of the castle was built during the sixteenth century, although I believe its foundations date from the fourteenth. CATHERINE: And our readers will care why? MARY: You may not care for accuracy, but I do—and Carmilla will, when she reads this book. CATHERINE: If I ever get the damn thing written, with all these interruptions!

The thing that bothers me about journalism is the false equivalency we sometimes place on certain issues.

What we want is responsible journalism. We want to avoid bigotry.

Even journalism has ethics and everyone should follow them.

A composite is a euphemism for a lie. It's disorderly. It's dishonest and it's not journalism.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

I had a very strong background in journalism, so it's my instinct to try to be as fair and accurate as possible.

Journalism is not writing.

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.