An open source list of philosophical quotes from literature that discuss data science, statistics, and/or artificial intelligence. All sources are cited and freely-accessible sources are linked.
| Quote | Source |
|---|---|
| “However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand -- but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.” |  Aldous Huxley. Foreword to Brave New World Revisited. 1958. https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ |
| “...was just the kind of mirage that came from modern day data dredging capabilities: if you watch trillions of things, you will often see one-in-a-million coincidences.” |  Vernor Vinge. Rainbows End, 3. 2006. |
| “The next logical concept then is: models and algorithms are not only capable of predicting the future, but also of causing the future. That’s what we can look forward to, in the best of cases, and what we should fear in the worst.” |  Cathy O'Neil and Rachel Schutt. Doing Data Science, 356. 2013. |