Quotes about Data

From the perspective of a classical historian, German scholar Hans Stier has concurred that agreement over basic data and divergence of details suggest credibility, because fabricated accounts tend to be fully consistent and harmonized. "Every historian," he wrote, "is especially skeptical at that moment when an extraordinary happening is only reported in accounts which are completely free of contradictions.

Today, the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis. . . . Those who wish to oppose it have no testable theory to marshal, only speculations about unseen universes spun from fertile scientific imagination. . . . Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced twentieth-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus.27

A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space.

Statistics can be made to prove anything - even the truth.

The mystery of consciousness? Erroneous data—significant results.

The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Accuracy and honesty have little to do with it.

What do you mean—desire, data and doubt?" "Desire brings the participants together. Data set the limits of their dialogue. Doubt frames the questions.

Once you have confidence in your instincts, you must never allow other people's refusal to believe, or their data to refute, what you instinctively know is true.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

We can say, "if you want government money, you have to make this data public - you have to share it."