John Tukey Quotes

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

I'm not too worried about stats and stuff like that.

The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn't know before.

To learn something from your data, the forming of a hypothesis lies with the human being, which turns into a query, which becomes a result. The problem is that there are too many queries to make, too many questions to ask.

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

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

Science thrives on self-correction …. refutation almost always contains positive lessons that overwhelm disappointment.

Good data is hard to find. Hard data is good to find.

The very first instrument for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge.

When numbers are being crunched by politicians, axes are usually grinding.

The quality of the data and information of a social science, economics or government study is inversely proportional to its importance and social significance.

The scientist … creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity … is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers

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

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed.

By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.

The numbers are hard to control.

The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions.