Quotes About Analysis

The IMF also said its own analysis of the future development of debt was wrong 'by a large margin.' … The IMF had originally projected Greece would lose 5.5% of its economic output between 2009 and 2012. The country has lost 17% in real gross domestic output instead. The plan predicted a 15% unemployment rate in 2012. It was 25%.

When you start a session in R, the variables you create are in the global environment .GlobalEnv

G. K. Chesterton's comment is apt: "though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators."1 So also Luther's: "Some have even brewed it [Revelation] into many stupid things out of their own heads.

In a probabilistic environment, you are better served by focusing on the process by which you make a decision than on the outcome

However, once you realize the answer to most questions is, "It depends," you are ready to embark on the quest to figure out what it depends on.

The key to statistical prediction is to figure out how much weight you should assign to the base rate and specific case. If the expected accuracy of the prediction is low, you should place most of the weight on the base rate. If the expected accuracy is high, you can rely more on the specific case.

To overcome inertia, Peter Drucker, the legendary consultant, suggested asking the seemingly naïve question, "If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?"26

Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question.

People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings. —John P. Kotter, The Heart of Change

The first diagram that you need on any project is a context diagram.

Many of the modeling mistakes are modeler's poor listening skills.

Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.

How, he asks, can the philosopher write about the Holocaust "in its totality," about the world of the victims and of the criminals? This question is not ours, but since he is asking precisely about how the philosopher can conduct the analysis into the whole of horror and resistance to it, his answer may help us to see what he thinks about the point of view or stance of the philosopher who carries out that analysis.

Soon thereafter, Tom asked me to write up dozens of one- to two-page case studies of transitions from authoritarian rule over the last fifty years,

Music theory, then, very simply, could be defined as a search for how and why music sounds right or wrong. In other words, the purpose of music theory is to explain why something sounded the way it did and how that sound can be made again.

The purpose of music theory is to both explain why something sounded the way it did, and how that sound can be made again.

Time and time again, as we will see, the brilliant forebears of modern neuroscience abandoned their fierce reasoning skills and, deus ex machina, threw in a spook at the end of their analysis.

The question is not whether he read James, but which James he read.

Niccolo Machiaveli stood apart from the rest of the crowd, arms lightly folded across his chest, careful not to wrinkle his Saile Row- tailored black silk tuxedo. Stone gray eyes swept over the other bidders, analyzing and assessing them.

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

The main lesson here is that not every problem can be solved at the level of abstraction where it manifests.

Given a choice between discussing the symbolism of a pig head on a stick and discussing my feelings, I'll take the pig head every time.