Data Selection Quotes

I research every possible bit of information I can find. Then I use about a tenth of it. But I have to know all the information first; otherwise, I'm not going to convince myself, and if I can't convince myself, then I'm not going to convince the reader.

There is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit... bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from.

Of Cooking. This is an art of various forms, the object of which is to give ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy. One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select only those which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unhappy if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

It is impossible, by the way, when picking one example of anything, to avoid picking one which is atypical in some sense.

If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.

Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.