Mike Patton Quotes

Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.

I think that too ended up affecting a lot of the different research questions that I later asked was really was about well to what extent... How do we balance choice as possibility and choice as limitations?

I have never suggested any principled difference between the natural and social sciences.

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.

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

People doing the kind of sound research that I'm interested in still have a difficult time.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.

In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

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.

If we just focus on stats, we're gonna eventually not have them.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.

I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.

I am an analyst; my job is to analyze.

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. Where humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

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.