Hilary Mason Quotes

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

Data can set you free.

Data is not intelligence.

The greatest moments are those when you see the result pop up in a graph or in your statistics analysis - that moment you realise you know something no one else does and you get the pleasure of thinking about how to tell them.

Research is creating new knowledge.

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.

Data is not necessarily information. Information does not necessarily lead to knowledge. And knowledge is not always sufficient to discover truth and breed wisdom.

Data without generalization is just gossip.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.

The possibilities for creation and insight are endless. We're constantly collecting more data, and it's starting to be very relevant to our lives.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

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 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.

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.

I don't want pictures, I want to find things out.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.

Context is to data what water is to a dolphin

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Experts often possess more data than judgment.