The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability. —Pierre Simon Laplace, Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, 1812
Any decision we think we are about to make is something that can be Googled before we commit to a choice.
The Likert scale. Respondents are asked to choose where they fall on a range of possible feelings about a thing, generally in the form of strongly dislike, dislike, strongly like, strongly disagree, a...
Measurement: A quantitatively expressed reduction of uncertainty based on one or more observations.
Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all. —Gilb’s Law
We need to lose less often in the fight against the bad guys. Or, at least, lose more gracefully and recover quickly.
The fact is that the preference for ignorance over even marginal reductions in ignorance is never the moral high ground.
Bandwagon bias.
Two good indicators of revealed preferences are things the people tend to value a lot: time and money. If you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money, you can infer quite a lo...
For all practical decision-making purposes, we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty.
Once managers figure out what they mean and why it matters, the issue in question starts to look a lot more measurable.
• If it’s really that important, it’s something you can define. If it’s something you think exists at all, it’s something you’ve already observed somehow. • If it’s something important and something u...
If you know almost nothing, almost anything will tell you something.
If you don’t know what to measure, measure anyway. You’ll learn what to measure.
Bertrand Russell once said, Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty. . . .
Myth: When you have a lot of uncertainty, you need a lot of data to tell you something useful. Fact: If you have a lot of uncertainty now, you don’t need much data to reduce uncertainty significantly....
The traditional form of Hoshin Kanri, there is a grouping of four perspectives. It is no surprise that the balanced scorecard perspectives are mirror images (see Exhibit 1.8). As with the balanced sco...
Modeling the world mathematically is as uniquely a human trait as language or art, but you would rarely find anyone complaining of being reduced to a poem or reduced to a painting.
The fact is that the preference for ignorance over even marginal reductions in ignorance is never the moral high ground. If decisions are made under a self-imposed state of higher uncertainty, policy...
Very few experts actually measure their performance over time, and they tend to summarize their memories with anecdotes. They are right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but the anecdotes they remember t...
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