“The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statement, but it's false data. Scientists aren't used to that scenario. An electron or a galaxy is not capricious, nor deceptive; but a human can be either or both.”

—  James Randi

Swift, 2 September 2005, "Another New Fan" http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-10/100620sentient.html#i7

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The conjuror or con man is a very good provider of information. He supplies lots of data, by inference or direct statem…" by James Randi?
James Randi photo
James Randi 8
Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic 1928

Related quotes

“But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.”

Source: The Heritage Universe, Transcendence (1992), Chapter 11 (p. 126)

Russell L. Ackoff photo
Timothy Ferriss photo
Joe Haldeman photo

“We’re inferring from an absence of data,” Jacque said. “That’s lousy science.”

Source: Mindbridge (1976), Chapter 28 “Chapter Eight” (p. 104)

Stanisław Lem photo
Arthur Conan Doyle photo
Grace Hopper photo

“The Group started out by trying to design a language for stating procedures, but soon discovered that what was really required was a description of the data and a statement of the relationships between the data sets.”

Grace Hopper (1906–1992) American computer scientist and United States Navy officer

As quoted in Management and the Computer of the Future (1962) by Sloan School of Management, p. 273
Context: We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data. We must also include a mechanism for determining the priorities to be applied to the data. These priorities are not fixed and are indicated in many cases by the data.
Thus we must have a language and a structure that will take care of the data descriptions and priorities, as well as the operations we wish to perform. If we think seriously about these problems, we find that we cannot work with procedures alone, since they are sequential. We need to define the problem instead of the procedures. The Language Structures Group of the Codasyl Committee has been studying the structure of languages that can be used to describe data-processing problems. The Group started out by trying to design a language for stating procedures, but soon discovered that what was really required was a description of the data and a statement of the relationships between the data sets. The Group has since begun writing an algebra of processes, the background for a theory of data processing.
Clearly, we must break away from the sequential and not limit the computers. We must state definitions and provide for priorities and descriptions of data. We must state relationships, not procedures.

Related topics