Data Limitation Quotes

There's been the emergence of a philosophy that big data is all you need. We would suggest that, actually, numbers don't speak for themselves.

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.

Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.

The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.

Minds think with ideas, not information No amount of data, bandwidth, or processing power can substitute for inspired thought.

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

No observational problem will not be solved by more data.

The biggest mistake is an over-reliance on data. Managers will say if there are no data they can take no action. However, data only exist about the past. By the time data become conclusive, it is too late to take actions based on those conclusions.

The specific experience with which economics and economic statistics are concerned always refers to the past. It is history, and as such does not provide knowledge about a regularity that will manifest itself also in the future.

I definitely think there's some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don't think data collects it. They're not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.

Computing is kind of a mess. Your computer doesn't know where you are. It doesn't know what you're doing. It doesn't know what you know.

While statistics are interesting, they're all in the past.

Stats are something which can't define everything. It could be hiding more things than it shows.

A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.