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Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
--
Quoted in William Kenneth Richmond (1969), The Education Industry

 

Charles Babbage

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We are thus led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by " soft " data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.

 

Bertrand Russell

 

…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

 

Linus Torvalds

 

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

 

Nick Bostrom

 

Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.

 

Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

Data mining, like any other government data analysis, should occur where there is a focused and demonstrable need to know, balanced against the dangers to civil liberties. It should be purposeful and responsible.

 

Philip D. Zelikow