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People . . . operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. —Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
PA is the process by which an organization learns from the experience it has collectively gained across its team members and computer systems. In fact, an organization that doesn’t leverage its data in this way is like a person with a photographic memory who never bothers to think.
John Wanamaker famously put it, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
What is the great revolution of science in the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability.
Inefficiencies are what traders live for. A perfectly efficient market can’t be played, but if you can identify the right imperfection, it’s payday.
The Mechanical Turk, a hoax in the eighteenth century, created the illusion of a machine playing chess. The Turk was a desk-sized box that revealed mechanical gears within and sported a chessboard on top. Seated behind the desk was a mannequin whose arm would reach across the board and move the pieces. A small human chess expert who did not suffer from claustrophobia (chess is a long game) hid inside the desk, viewing the board from underneath and manipulating the mannequin’s arm. Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin had the pleasure of losing to this wonder of innovation—I mean, this
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“Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”
Privacy is a compromise between the interests of the government and the citizen. —Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman and former CEO, Google, 2011
When we think in terms of power, it is clear we are getting a raw deal: we grant private entities—with no interest in the public good and no public accountability—greater powers of persuasion than anyone has ever had before and in exchange we get free email. —Alexander Furnas, writer for The Atlantic
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. —Thomas Edison
Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not measurable, make measurable. —Galileo
The growth is exponential. Data more than doubles every three years. This will bring us to an estimated 8 zettabytes by 2015—that’s 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (21 zeros) bytes. Welcome to Big Bang 2.0. The next logical question is: what’s the most valuable thing to do with all this stuff? This book’s answer: Learn from it how to predict.
Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “[A man’s] true self is dictated by his actions.”
Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. —Bertolt Brecht
Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes. —Oscar Wilde
Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code. —Hacker aphorism
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. —Albert Einstein (as paraphrased by Roger Sessions)
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell
