“Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.”

— Charles Babbage

Quoted in William Kenneth Richmond (1969), The Education Industry.
May be modern paraphrase of "the errors which arise from the absence of facts" quote above.
Attributed

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 "Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all." by Charles Babbage?

Charles Babbage40

mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical enginee… 1791–1871

Related quotes

“The more data banks record about us, the less we exist.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.”

Robert J. Shiller (1946) American economist

“Rule 1. Original data should be presented in a way that will preserve the evidence in the original data for all the predictions assumed to be useful.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931

“The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.”

Charles Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

Source: On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832/1841, p. 156. Ch. 17 "Of Price as Measured by Money"

“The global warming crowd is using all the surface data, including cities like L. A. to support their claim, and the data is flawed because it's influenced by human development. It's about asphalt, not the atmosphere.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

No proof on global warming, Chico Enterprise-Record, June 10, 2003.
2003

“90 percent of all problems can be solved by using the techniques of data stratification, histograms, and control charts. Among the causes of nonconformance, only one-fifth or less are attributable to the workers.”

Kaoru Ishikawa (1915–1989) Japanese business theorist

Kaoru Ishikawa, as cited in:The Quality Management Journal. Vol. 1 (1993), p. 89

“We are thus led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by " soft " data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), p. 70

“The fact must be expressed as data, but there is a problem in that the correct data is difficult to catch. So that I always say "When you see the data, doubt it!" "When you see the measurement instrument, doubt it!… For example, if the methods such as sampling, measurement, testing and chemical analysis methods were incorrect, data… to measure true characteristics and in an unavoidable case, using statistical sensory test and express them as data.”

Kaoru Ishikawa (1915–1989) Japanese business theorist

Kaoru Ishikawa in: Annual Quality Congress Transactions, (1981), p. 130

“The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 69

“Data is transformed into graphics to understand. A map, a diagram are documents to be interrogated. But understanding means integrating all of the data. In order to do this it’s necessary to reduce it to a small number of elementary data. This is the objective of the “data treatment” be it graphic or mathematic.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

About the true value of graphics
Interview with Jacques Bertin (2003)

“Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Charles Babbage40

Related quotes

Related topics