Michael Shermer Quotes

Do not speculate; get data and calculate.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom…

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

I am strongly committed to evidence-based policymaking across government.

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

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I'm joking, but who would've guessed that computer engineers would've been the sexy job of the 1990s?

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

Evolving technologies that allow economists to gather new types of data and to manipulate millions of data points are just one factor among several that are likely to transform the field in coming years.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

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

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.

Far from being a loathsome aberration that ought to be purged from our behavior, it turns out that stereotypes are essential life tools, are accurate much more often than not.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

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