Romain

“The British statistician George Box has become famous for his brief but invaluable aphorism: ‘All models are wrong, some are useful.’ This pithy statement was based on a lifetime spent bringing statistical expertise to industrial processes, which led Box to appreciate both the power of models, but also the danger of actually starting to believe in them too much.”
― David Spiegelhalter, The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data

“Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Livres de Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Illustré): Le Petit Prince, Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes, Courrier sud, Citadelle

“So for a survey of 1,000 people (the industry standard), the margin of error is generally quoted as ± 3%:fn8 if 400 of them said they preferred coffee, and 600 of them said they preferred tea, then you could roughly estimate the underlying percentage of people in the population who prefer coffee as 40 ± 3%, or between 37% and 43%. Of course, this is only accurate if the polling company really did take a random sample, and everyone replied, and they all had an opinion either way and they all told the truth. So although we can calculate margins of error, we must remember that they only hold if our assumptions are roughly correct. But can we rely on these assumptions?”
― David Spiegelhalter, The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data

“Burrell Smith, the designer of the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at the first Hacker Conference: “Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It’s not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you’re doing.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution