Quotes About Analysis

In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is Am I failing differently each time? "If you keep making the same68 mistakes again and again," the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, "you aren't learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.

Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

I make no attempt to forecast the general market -- my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.

If you're an investor, you're looking on what the asset is going to do, if you're a speculator, you're commonly focusing on what the price of the object is going to do, and that's not our game.

There is only one road to follow, that of analysis of the basic elements in order to arrive ultimately at an adequate graphic expression.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

root cause of the problem may be happening, further isolating the problem. This section begins with a brief explanation of how ping works. It then moves on to some suggestions and analysis of how to use the ping command to isolate problems by removing some items from consideration.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Good intelligence wins battles long before the first arrow is shot or the first sword is drawn from its scabbard.

regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.

Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it.

Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.

premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The

Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2.

Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

How closely does System 2 monitor the suggestions of System 1? His reasoning was that we know a significant fact about anyone who says that the ball costs 10¢: that person did not actively check whether the answer was correct, and her System 2 endorsed an intuitive answer that it could have rejected with a small investment of effort.

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.

Recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement of system 2.

An impressive series of studies by Thomas Åstebro sheds light on what happens when optimists receive bad news.

the following two statements mean exactly the same thing: Large samples are more precise than small samples. Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do.

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics