Debra Fischer Quotes

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

To learn something from your data, the forming of a hypothesis lies with the human being, which turns into a query, which becomes a result. The problem is that there are too many queries to make, too many questions to ask.

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes: a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

If computers remain far worse than us at image recognition, a certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level.

People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!

I love data. I think it's very important to get it right, and I think it's good to question it.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

I've always been a believer in research. It's great to have an instinctual human reaction to a character, too, of course, but it has to be countered with knowledge and understanding.

People are wiser than we are willing to attribute to them.

A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

Human intelligence trumps electronic or signals intelligence every time.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

It is the mark of a greatly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics.

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.

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

Sometimes I implant thoughts, sometimes I extract thoughts, but I don't like to explain it too much. It's based on science, deduction, and reasoning - it's a bit like what 'Sherlock' does, except that's a dramatised version. I look at every clue around me.

Everyone talks about how much data's in the world. Except, actually, 80% of it is pretty blind to computers. I mean, it can store it. But if it's a movie, a poem, a song, it doesn't know what it's actually saying or doing.

Obviously, stats are important tools, but I think there's something behind those things; somewhere along the way, you've got to try to look inside someone.

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions.