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...
• 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...
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...
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...
Understanding how to measure uncertainty is key to measuring risk. Understanding risk in a quantitative sense is key to understanding how to compute the value of information. Understanding the value o...
Knowing something about the monetary value and cost of the information in a measurement puts a new light on what is measurable. If someone says a measurement would be too expensive, we have to ask, Co...
A cybersecurity expert can become well versed in technical details such as conducting penetration tests, using encryption tools, setting up firewalls, and much more—and still be unable to realisticall...
We know that decision makers will experience an increase in confidence in their decisions even when the analysis or information-gathering methods are found to be ineffectual. This is part of what Dawe...
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.
It seems that to have a truly profound revelation, you almost always have to look at something other than what you have been looking at in the past. Being able to compute the value of information has...
For all practical decision-making purposes, we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty. A mere reduction, not necessarily elimination, of uncertainty will suff...
Researchers have run experiments25 showing that experts can be trained to be better at estimating probabilities by applying a battery of estimation tests, giving the experts a lot of quick, repetitive...
Given a particular observation, it may seem more obvious to frame a measurement by asking the question, What can I conclude from this observation? or, in probabilistic terms, What is the probability X...
Why do we care about measurements at all? There are just three reasons. The first reason—and the focus of this book—is that we should care about a measurement because it informs key decisions. Second,...
It is not too bold a statement to say that a software development project is one of the riskiest investments a business makes. For example, the chance of a large software project being canceled increa...
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
The objection to using stats boils down to nothing more than an irrational fear of numbers causing some to believe math somehow detracts from understanding or appreciation
When presented new information, we have no other option than to relate it to what we already know—there is no blank space in our minds within which new information can be stored so as not to contamina...
Consider these statistics. It used to cost Farm Journal, a client of Key Survey, an average of $4 to $5 per respondent for a 40- to 50-question survey of farmers. Now, using Key Survey, it costs Farm...
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...
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