Joel Salatin Quotes

Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.

Enough research will tend to support your conclusions.

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom…

If you're going to decide to run a data-driven campaign, decision-making has to follow it.

Data only exists within the framework of a vision you're building to, a hypothesis of where you're moving to.

When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.

She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

Passion provides purpose, but data drives decisions.

Data drives success. That is how we began our success with eSpeed. It was always based on the data.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity.

Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any. The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action. The step intermediate between the collection of data and the action is prediction.

If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.

People who have various kinds of politics for whom it is congenial for their apriority politics to say yes, things are getting much worse. They are opposed by people who also have a priori politics saying that this is the best of all possible worlds, capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread and you're just alarmists and so on and they can massage the data so it fits them.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

Men who have excessive faith in their theories ... make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat

But what I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim. And it is important, in this seat, to make sure that you're making your best judgments based on data, intelligence, the information that's coming from your commanders and folks on the ground and you're not being swayed by politics.

It's the business that you guys are in too. We try to get as much information as we can and make the best decisions that we can for the football team.

I tell people to start implementing when they are pretty sure there aren't more important stories out there. An iteration's worth of data is worth months of speculation.

I only use statistics to reinforce what I already think, or if it's something unusual.

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

The e-mails are mainly about a controversy over a particular data set and the ways a particular small group of scientists have displayed that dataset.

The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape.

The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.