You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
People believe the best way to learn from the data is to have a hypothesis and then go check it, but the data is so complex that someone who is working with a data set will not know the most significant things to ask. That's a huge problem.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
Now we have a whole separate supplier of data for Able Danger who's verifying that same information.
Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.
The fact is that data are worth a lot of money.
The only way people can really be excellent is with truth, so you have to have a CFO who will have the intellectual capacity and conviction to tell you you're wrong and try to support that with data.
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.
If someone's criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don't want to hear it. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.
Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.