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1 " Will those insights be tested,or simply used to justify the status quo and reinforce prejudices? When I consider the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data, I'm often reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly the rage in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists would run their fingers over the patient's skull, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits that existed in twenty-seven regions of the brain. Usually the conclusion of the phrenologist jibed with the observations he made. If the patient was morbidly anxious or suffering from alcoholism, the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation - which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology. Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap. Models like the ones that red-lighted Kyle Behm and black-balled foreign medical students and St. George's can lock people out, even when the " science" inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions. "
2 " Will those insights be tested, or simply used to justify the status quo and reinforce prejudices? When I consider the sloppy and self-serving ways that companies use data, I'm often reminded of phrenology, a pseudoscience that was briefly the rage in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists would run their fingers over the patient's skull, probing for bumps and indentations. Each one, they thought, was linked to personality traits that existed in twenty-seven regions of the brain. Usually the conclusion of the phrenologist jibed with the observations he made. If the patient was morbidly anxious or suffering from alcoholism, the skull probe would usually find bumps and dips that correlated with that observation - which, in turn, bolstered faith in the science of phrenology. Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap. Models like the ones that red-lighted Kyle Behm and black-balled foreign medical students and St. George's can lock people out, even when the " science" inside them is little more than a bundle of untested assumptions. "
3 " Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him. "
― Jennifer Egan , A Visit from the Goon Squad
4 " I know you, Ruth Ann Carver. I know you better than you know yourself. You think you do things right. You think you're a paragon of right living. This is a self-told lie, one bolstered by your coddling parents and grandparents. "
― Carolyn Lee Adams , Ruthless
5 " It is nearly impossible to feel anything negative in here. Because you’re really connected, to everything, here… but it’s only meant to be a temporary sanctuary, a place to remember yourself. In time you’ll want your negative thoughts, your emotional baggage back, and you’ll have hopefully bolstered yourself enough with the Sanctum’s reminder of your Source that you can come out with fresh perspective. When you’ve had enough of it, you’ll know, and then come and join us outside. "
― Colleen Chen , Dysmorphic Kingdom
6 " Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'.- M.F.K. Fisher " A Is for Dining Alone "
7 " Inside accounts of Presidential advisory groups make it clear that the failure to express dissent can have direct, immediate, and severe consequences...Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do. Bolstered by such a false sense of social support, our beliefs strike us as more resistant to subsequent logical and empirical challenge. "
― Thomas Gilovich , How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life