Quotes about data
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“Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.”

Sean Reardon American sociologist

No Rich Child Left Behind, 2013

Children, School, Family, Question

“Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game.”

Massimo Pigliucci (1964) chair of the Department of Philosophy at CUNY-Lehman College

On The Problem of Consciousness, Panpsychism & More https://letter.wiki/conversation/277 February 11, 2020

Game

“Listen, one doesn’t need to be religious (nor a rocket scientist) to see the value of abstinence. Let’s disregard the immediately eliminated risk of increasingly popular STD’ and STI’s. Heck, let’s even discount the statistical data showing that sexual exclusivity seems overwhelmingly conducive to a successful marriage .Abstinence also provides an incomparable bond of trust in a relationship.”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

Marriage, Success

“A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.”

Maurice Allais (1911–2010) French economist; 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

L'anisotropie de l'espace. La nécessaire révision de certains postulats des théories contemporaines. Les données de l'expérience (1997), p. 591

Falseness

“Because we have not understood that wholes are more than the sum of their parts, we have assembled our information into islands, an archipelago of disconnected data. Our great institutions have evolved in virtual isolation from one another.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Parting

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

https://lwn.net/Articles/193245/

Bad luck

“Every day, we are learning more about this virus and the disease it causes. One of the things we are learning is that although older people are the hardest hit, younger people are not spared. Data from many countries clearly show that people under 50 make up a significant proportion of patients requiring hospitalization. Today, I have a message for young people: you are not invincible. This virus could put you in hospital for weeks, or even kill you. Even if you don’t get sick, the choices you make about where you go could be the difference between life and death for someone else. I’m grateful that so many young people are spreading the word and not the virus. As I keep saying, solidarity is the key to defeating COVID-19 - solidarity between countries, but also between age groups. Thank you for heeding our call for solidarity, solidarity, solidarity.”

Tedros Adhanom (1965) Director-General of the World Health Organization, former Minister in Ethiopia

WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 - 20 March 2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---20-march-2020, World Health Organization.

Life, Death, People, Age

“We really haven't got any great amount of data on the subject, and without data how can we reach any definite conclusions? All we have — everything — favors the idea of what religionists call the "Hereafter."”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Science, if it ever learns the facts, probably will find another more definitely descriptive term.

As quoted in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295
1930s

Idea

“Data is of course important in manufacturing, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts.”

Taiichi Ohno (1912–1990) Japanese businessman and engineer

“It seems that white people on average are quite silly, for most of us have lapped up the version of Indian history propagated by India's "eminent historians" whose eminence results from their toeing the hegemonic party-line rather than from a respect for the data in the primary sources.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

305
2010s, The argumentative Hindu (2012)

People, History

“Fabricating astronomical data going back thousands of years calls for knowledge of Newton’s Law of Gravitation and the ability to solve differential equations.”

N. S. Rajaram (1943–2019) Indian mathematician

N.S. Rajaram: The Politics of History, p.47.

Law, Knowledge

“At this stage I do not think that the international comparisons and the data are yet there to draw the conclusions that we want.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Prime Minister's Questions https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-05-06/debates/FD4CE89E-F564-4D9F-B396-59684C404BB8/PrimeMinister (6 May 2020) <br class="br">2020s, 2020

Thinking, Drawing

“There is an invaluable treasure trove of useful historical data that has only just begun to be used to inform our actions. The lessons of 1918 (Spanish flu), if well heeded, might help us to avoid repeating the same history today (COVID-19).”

Stephen S. Morse (1951) American virologist and epidemiologist

Source: Stephen S. Morse (2020) cited in " How some cities ‘flattened the curve’ during the 1918 flu pandemic https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus/" on National Geographic, 27 March 2020.

History, Help

“The Indus civilization has challenged scholars’ understanding since its discovery some eighty years ago, and in recent years the application of systematic and problem-orientated research, coupled with much new and unexpected data, has overturned many previous interpretations.”

Jane McIntosh (1950) Scottish archaeologist and author

Source: Jane McIntosh, The Ancient Indus Valley, 2008

Understanding, Problem

“Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information "superhighway" now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness — and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a "lack of evidence to indict" is the moral equivalent of the good deed.”

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005) American writer

Foreword to Words of Power: Voices from Indian America (1994), also quoted in "Vine Deloria, Jr." at Indigenous Peoples Literature (2015) by Glen Welker http://www.indigenouspeople.net/vine.htm

Life, People, Making love, Question

“In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself.
In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.
Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 152

War, Nature, Problem

“Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

John Ziman in "Reliable Knowledge: an Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science" (1978)

Books, Knowledge, Perfection, Falseness

“How to make a list? Collecting the data, that's the easy bit. Sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult. Shortening the list is the most difficult part. That a really difficult problem.”

Joe Armstrong (1950–2019) British computer scientist

The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science

Problem, Parting

“We feel that users have more expectations. Concerning antitrust, privacy protections, the prevention of big data price discrimination, and so on, we, as users, share these concerns. For instance, with our gaming business, we know there are a lot of doubts.”

Ma Huateng (1971) Chinese internet entrepreneur

"Tencent founder Pony Ma emphasises company’s investment in social value amid increasing antitrust and gaming scrutiny" in South China Morning Post (23 April 2021) https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3130836/pony-ma-emphasises-tencents-investment-social-value-amid-increasing

Feeling, Game, Business

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

Charles Sheffield book Transcendence

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

Intelligence

“No data is preferable to poor data.”

Robert L. Forward book Dragon's Egg

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

“Science books go out of date. We throw the old one away when a newer one comes out, when we have new theories. But we don't throw away our old data; we merely interpret them differently. New theories try to account for old data (and new data) in new ways.”

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

[Consolmagno, Guy, Mueller, Paul, https://www.google.com/books?id=lf5vDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA16, 9780804136952, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: And Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-Box at the Vatican Observatory, 16, 2014, Image]

Books, Way, Science

“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)

Idea, Science