The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

That doesn’t mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they’ll accept it.

at some point numbers do count.

if evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected.

It isn't what you suspect, it's what you can prove that counts.

Very few of us in our saner moments believe that the particular postulates that some logicians have dreamed up create the numbers - no, most of us believe that the real numbers are simply there and that it has been an interesting, amusing, and important game to try to find a nice set of postulates to account for them.

cuando un cálculo confirma las propias expectativas, uno simplemente se reafirma un poco en su comprensión intuitiva de las leyes de la física. Pero cuando un cálculo contradice las expectativas, uno está en el camino hacia una nueva intuición.

People see certain things and draw conclusions that are actually valid for the data they have. But then somebody else goes to investigate, maybe at a different time or using a bit of a different approach, collects a different set of data, and they get a different answer.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.

Numbers create accountability. When you set a number, everyone knows what the expectation is.

I... tell... how numbers in economics are defined and put together... not as... objective as... weight or... temperature...

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose.

As for negative numbers... most mathematicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not accept them... In the fifteenth century and, in the sixteenth, Stifel both spoke of negative numbers as absurd numbers. ...Descartes accepted them, in part. ...he had shown that, given an equation, one can obtain another whose roots are larger than the original one by any given quantity. Thus an equation with negative roots could be transformed into one with positive roots. Since we can turn false roots into real roots, Descartes was willing to accept negative numbers. Pascal regarded the subtraction of 4 from zero as utter nonsense.

Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed