“With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.”

— Carl Sagan , book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 94

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Carl Sagan 365

American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

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“If the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.”

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“A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has the more willing he is to give a firm opinion; and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts.”

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 49.

“Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.”

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Extra-judicial writings

“To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Duty of Inquiry
Context: To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

“It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference
Context: p>We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.</p

“I have experienced time and again people dismissing the data because they think MOND is wrong, so I am very consciously drawing a red line between the theory and the data.”

Stacy McGaugh (1964) American astronomer

as quoted in [Cooper, Keith, Correlation between galaxy rotation and visible matter puzzles astronomers, 7 October 2016, physicsworld.com, http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2016/oct/07/correlation-between-galaxy-rotation-and-visible-matter-puzzles-astronomers]