John Holdren Quotes

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

The falsification of scientific data or analysis is always a serious matter.

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.

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.

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

Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round

You can use data wrong. It's just like polling. There have been a lot of politicians who go conduct a poll to figure out what they believe.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

To the extreme I rock a mike like a vandal.

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

Data really powers everything that we do.

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

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

Why don't I talk about Big Data? Because I am focused on intelligent answers and not speeds and feeds. It doesn't matter if it is quick if it's the wrong answer.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with

You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

I've just completed Mike's [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's [Briffa] to hide the decline.

It is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

I wanted to get my movie noticed WITHOUT spending any ad money. So I made a bit of a spectacle. I recorded lots of podcasts. I bickered with hate groups. I criticized critics. I banged pots together. I did everything I could to raise awareness without raising any money to do so.

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.

It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.

When discussing organic evolution the only point of agreement seems to be: ‘It happened.’ Thereafter, there is little consensus, which at first sight must seem rather odd.

Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.