Lewis D. Eigen Quotes

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

No government at any level has all the answers.

We’re not used to calculating large amounts of data. Our brains think anecdotally.

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right. If you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.

We need to know what are the best jobs for which we can train young people so that the jobs will be available in growing numbers, are not dead end jobs, the jobs will not be obsoleted by automation, and there are no artificial ethnic or racial barriers to employment. Your Bureau of Labor Statistics has been working on this for 8 weeks now, and you come with your staff and say that you do not have sufficient data to make this judgment. Well if there were sufficient data, we could apply it and make the decisions without you. The reason we need your expertise is that your intuition and experience should enable you to make a better guess with the insufficient information than we would make who have no experience.

You can't manage science.... There are some things that you have to do based on the facts regardless of your ideology.

We have an expression in New York City government - "In God we trust, but for everyone else, bring data." It's so easy to pick up a sound byte and say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that," without really thinking.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

The advantage of the analytical approach is that it is widely applicable, and it can provide a considerable amount of quantitative information even with a relatively poor resolving power.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

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

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

Being a cabinet minister is not like running a company. A country is not a company.

I can solve every problem a year later.

It is axiomatic in politics that the earlier one addresses a problem, the more the alternatives and the easier the solutions.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

Are our problems moving faster than our ability to solve them?

the cause must be ascertained, before the remedy is devised.