“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.”

—  John Tukey

Sunset salvo. The American Statistician 40 (1). Online at http://www.jstor.org/pss/2683137

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 combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extract…" by John Tukey?
John Tukey photo
John Tukey 3
American mathematician 1915–2000

Related quotes

Russell L. Ackoff photo
Isaac Asimov photo
Judea Pearl photo
Thomas Paine photo
Guy Consolmagno photo

“Science doesn't stop when it comes up with a nice answer. It looks for more data. It comes up with new ideas. It's willing to admit it's wrong.”

Guy Consolmagno (1952) American Jesuit, Catholic Priest, research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory.

[From MIT to Specola Vaticana: Guy Consolmagno at TEDxViadellaConcialiazione, April 24, 2013, TEDx Talks, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmU2gDbP_Tk] (quote at 6:38 of 17:52)

Michele Bachmann photo
Lawrence Lessig photo

“While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

May the Source Be With You (2001)
Context: While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.

“No data is preferable to poor data.”

Source: Dragon's Egg (1980), Chapter 2, “Pulsar” Section 3 (p. 26)

Related topics