favorite quotes

 

"I think the major issue is how broad the evidence is on which you rest your case. Some of the modern approaches involve mining and exploring a single body of evidence within itself. When you try to apply statistical tests of significance, you never know how many degrees of freedom you have because you’re taking the best out of many tries.

I believe that you have a more secure basis if, instead of relying on extremely sophisticated analysis of a small fixed body of data, you rely on cruder analysis of a much broader and wider body of data, which will include widely different circumstances. The natural experiments that come up over a wide range provide a source of evidence that is stronger and more reliable than any single very limited body of data. "

- Milton Friedman

 

"No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.”

- Harlow Shapley

 

 “One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.”

- ​Kaushik Basu

 

"Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness."

- Thomas Huxley

 

" Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory."

- Henry David Thoreau