Isaac Asimov Quotes

She is nether fish nor flesh, nor good red herring.

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.

We don’t have any metrics on that.

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.

We need to know what are the best jobs for which we can train young people so that the jobs will be available in growing numbers, are not dead end jobs, the jobs will not be obsoleted by automation, and there are no artificial ethnic or racial barriers to employment. Your Bureau of Labor Statistics has been working on this for 8 weeks now, and you come with your staff and say that you do not have sufficient data to make this judgment. Well if there were sufficient data, we could apply it and make the decisions without you. The reason we need your expertise is that your intuition and experience should enable you to make a better guess with the insufficient information than we would make who have no experience.

I have never been a stats person.

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

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

Sometimes there are no answers.

Even one well-made observation will be enough in many cases, just as one well-constructed experiment often suffices for the establishment of a law.

With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.

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.

People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

If the statistics are boring, you've got the wrong numbers.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Meaningless yards are not meaningful.

My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent.

Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.

It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

Answer all the questions that I'm too afraid to ask

I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.