Edward de Bono Quotes

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom…

Analytics is not about sitting behind a computer and pushing enter and having it produce an answer.

The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas.

A great many people mistake opinions for thought.

I never did any training in journalism or in finance, so I really was in the deep end. I got very good at going to press conferences and nodding. I'd figure it out when I got back to the office. Charts and numbers. I've never been great with facts, ever, my whole life. For a journalist, that's not a very good trait.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

I like to look for patterns in science and life. It's what I do.

The problem is that many times people suspend their common sense because they get drowned in business models and Harvard business school teachings.

We mostly feel fearful because we feel powerless. We feel powerless, I contend, because of a style of thinking that splits information in two poles that makes us lose all the operative information we need to solve the problem.

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

Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.

Belief gets in the way of learning.

It is the mark of a greatly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics.

A good scientist goes beyond the data he has. He applies new concepts he hadn't applied before….On some things, I was not right, but ... you can propose these ideas and stimulate thinking

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

Sometimes I implant thoughts, sometimes I extract thoughts, but I don't like to explain it too much. It's based on science, deduction, and reasoning - it's a bit like what 'Sherlock' does, except that's a dramatised version. I look at every clue around me.

I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.