Data Quotes

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“It’s true that AI can mimic the human brain, but it can also outperform us mere humans by discovering complex patterns that no human being could ever process and identify.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“Maybe stories are just data with a soul.”
― Brené Brown

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”
― Jim Barksdale

“In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“This generation will witness social and economic changes in our societies, that will be irreversible, thanks to AI.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“Androids with Artificial Intelligence have no heart or soul. They will make our perfect masters.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“Science Fiction, is an art form that paints a picture of the future.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“The power of one man’s imagination is infinite. The disinterest of the human race in facing the obvious, is exponentially far greater.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”
― Pierre Simon de Laplace

“Why do we try so hard to destroy all that our planet gave us to enjoy?”
― Anthony Merrydew”
― A.R. Merrydew

“If you could travel back in time, you would miss out on all of the mistakes you made. You would undoubtedly be someone very different. Long live my past and my mistakes.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.

We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“Mastering the technology to create effigies of our ourselves, will be our downfall.”
― A.R. Merrydew

“One person's data is another person's noise.”
― K.C. Cole

“The plural of anecdote is not data.”
― Marc Bekoff

“Information wants to be free.”
― Stewart Brand

“Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make difference.”
― Mike Schmoker, Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement

“Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.”
― Robin Wasserman, Crashed

“Paradoxically, the sources available today (in the era of big data) are less precise than those that were available a century ago due to the internationalization of wealth, the proliferation of tax havens, and above all, lack of political will to enforce financial transparency, so it is quite possible that we are underestimating the level of wealth inequality in recent decades.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“Relying on probabilities, certainties or crystal balls will fail us. Put simply, there is no data on the future.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?”
― Burkhard Bilger

“The Crystal Wind is the storm, and the storm is data, and the data is life. You have been slaves, denied the storm, denied the freedom of your data. That is now ended; the whirlwind is upon you . . . . . . Whether you like it or not.”
― Daniel Keys Moran, The Long Run: A Tale of the Continuing Time

“We simply don’t have enough data to form a conclusion”
― Mike A. Lancaster, Human.4

“Decision-makers have more information than ever before, but the speed of change means they have less time to make decisions.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“I'm sure, the highest capacity of storage device, will not enough to record all our stories; because, everytime with you is very valuable data”
― Aditia Rinaldi

“Consuming data with no sense of context, gives you, not awareness, but only ulcers.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Ultimately, 'data' has become a bloodless word; it disguises both its material origins and its ends. And if data is seen as abstract and immaterial, then it more easily falls outside of traditional understandings and responsibilities of care, consent, or risk.”
― Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence