Scott Adams Quotes

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

My job is to provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Experts often possess more data than judgment.

If you talk about preemption you better know things rather than think things.

All models have faults - that doesn't mean you can't use them as tools for making decisions.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

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

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

Do not speculate; get data and calculate.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

Every good businessman or woman carefully analyzes all the available facts before making a decision.

The wise policymaker doesn't assume that any policy adopted in good faith will have good results. Instead, he or she weighs the likely outcome of any new policy based on facts and experience - not sentiments and dreams.

Scientific education is by far the best training for all walks of life because it teaches us how to assess situations critically and react accordingly. It gives us an understanding based on reverence for life-enhancing technologies as well as for life itself.

At TechStars, I have the privilege of working with hundreds of the best and brightest start-up mentors on the planet. We coach our mentors to take a Socratic approach and to provide data rather than decisions.

Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".