Sanjaya Baru Quotes

Aggregate statistics can sometimes mask important information.

When numbers are being crunched by politicians, axes are usually grinding.

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

In modern politics, polls often serve as the canary in the mine - an early warning signal of danger or trends. But polls can also be used to wag the dog - diverting attention from something significant.

Biases and blind spots exist in big data as much as they do in individual perceptions and experiences. Yet there is a problematic belief that bigger data is always better data and that correlation is as good as causation.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

If we start to use social media data sets to take the pulse of a nation or understand a crisis - or actually use it to deploy resources - we are getting a skewed picture of what is happening.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

Nowadays, it has become a custom to criticise the BJP for everything.

What yells out at the US public . . . is the incandescent hypocrisy of so many people who, in the name of free speech, persecute its practitioners if their opinions are conservative.

We've always had anti-Americans. We've always had left-wing protesters and so forth, but they were always off to the left kooks. They were always oddball nutcases. Now they're not. They come across as ordinary, everyday mainstream people. It just disgusts me. It's so unfortunate, so unnecessary.

You can use data wrong. It's just like polling. There have been a lot of politicians who go conduct a poll to figure out what they believe.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

I don't really stay away from politics but the bullshit just gets to be too much. Any political tweets I take down after an hour or so. They are met with such a wall of stupidity and anger, it is hardly worth it to leave it up. Particularly, if you say anything about Hillary Clinton, the responses are just nuts - "YOU JUST FEAR SMART, STRONG WOMEN, MR. MAN".

We fall for... the theories of betrayal very easily, and one of the things that's always depressed me about the left, ever since I started in politics, is their ability to imbibe the propaganda of the right and regurgitate it to the left.

This is partly a function of approval ratings. People pay attention [to polls] and start saying, 'Lets take a more independent tack.' It is frankly self-interest, self-preservation.

If you just look at the data, you are led to believe that things are getting better, rather than worse. That's why the fall is really precipitous, once you hit the ceiling.

The Charkha in the hands of a poor widow brings a paltry price to her, in the hands of Jawaharlal; it is an instrument of India's freedom.

It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once.

It's getting so if a man wants to stand well socially, he can't afford to be seen with either the Democrats or the Republicans.

Every single of us is going to be saying, "Thank God, finally, an interesting convention." But you're right about all those people out there. All the people who have been energized by the Trump campaign are going to be very, very angry folk if they think that Trump is not well treated.

In the gospel message, the beginning of change occurs in the heart of each individual. This heart change makes a difference in the home, then in the community, and ultimately in the nation- and in turn it shapes the future of a cultural ethos.

If you think that people today, like Hollywood, are ever gonna sing [Donald] Trump's praises, it's never gonna happen. It's only going to get worse. And they know it at the White House. They're not expecting these people to be won over. That's not why Trump's doing anything he's doing. They don't expect the establishment types to one day say, "You know what? You're right, Mr. Trump, this is great. We like what you're doing." It's never gonna happen. They don't expect that to happen.