Jim Peebles Quotes

You have to put together bits and pieces of information before you can draw overall conclusions.

He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Logic can become enormously difficult, and it would undoubtedly be well to produce more assurance in its use.

Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.

That's the way most everyone gets here. It's really quite simple: every time you decide something without having a good reason, you jump to Conclusions whether you like it or not. It's such an easy trip to make that I've been here hundreds of times.

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

I'm not too worried about that. I am a big believer in modeling.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

It's more fun to arrive a conclusion than to justify it.

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.

But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.

I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what's the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

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

I learnt early that always being analytical is important for a business. Being analytical as an attitude is more important than just having the aptitude.

As a consultant at McKinsey, I learned the value of data and the ability to shape that information into an answer.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

It is difficult finding intelligence that is actionable in a lot of these places, but we have to keep trying.