Famous Analytics Quotes

famous saying among policy analysts is “let me pick your options, and I will make the decision for you,” which illustrates the importance of keeping an eye out for a better option.

there is a persistent emphasis on religious themes, such as the nature of the Islamic warrior, the role of Islam in training, the importance of Islamic ideology for the army, and the salience of jihad. Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India. A comparable focus on religion in the Indian army (which shares a common heritage with the Pakistan Army) would be quite scandalous. It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata. Judging by the frequency with which articles on such topics appear in Pakistan’s professional publications, religion is clearly acceptable, and perhaps desirable, as a subject of discussion.

A detailed analysis of the most famous novels would show, in different perspectives each time, that the essence of the novel lies in this perpetual alteration, always directed toward the same ends, that the artist makes in his own experience. Far from being moral or even purely formal, this alteration aims, primarily, at unity and thereby expresses a metaphysical need. The novel, on this level, is primarily an exercise of the intelligence in the service of nostalgic or rebellious sensibilities. It would be possible to study this quest for unity in the French analytical novel and in Melville, Balzac, Dostoievsky, or Tolstoy

The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided. Just as earlier I described how a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills can render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write well and therefore less prepared for their own futures.

Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India.

glory, at the Science Museum of London. Charles Babbage was a well-known scientist and inventor of the time. He had spent years working on his Difference Engine, a revolutionary mechanical calculator. Babbage was also known for his extravagant parties, which he called “gatherings of the mind” and hosted for the upper class, the well-known, and the very intelligent.4 Many of the most famous people from Victorian England would be there—from Charles Darwin to Florence Nightingale to Charles Dickens. It was at one of these parties in 1833 that Ada glimpsed Babbage’s half-built Difference Engine. The teenager’s mathematical mind buzzed with possibilities, and Babbage recognized her genius immediately. They became fast friends. The US Department of Defense uses a computer language named Ada in her honor. Babbage sent Ada home with thirty of his lab books filled with notes on his next invention: the Analytic Engine. It would be much faster and more accurate than the Difference Engine, and Ada was thrilled to learn of this more advanced calculating machine. She understood that it could solve even harder, more complex problems and could even make decisions by itself. It was a true “thinking machine.”5 It had memory, a processor, and hardware and software just like computers today—but it was made from cogs and levers, and powered by steam. For months, Ada worked furiously creating algorithms (math instructions) for Babbage’s not-yet-built machine. She wrote countless lines of computations that would instruct the machine in how to solve complex math problems. These algorithms were the world’s first computer program. In 1840, Babbage gave a lecture in Italy about the Analytic Engine, which was written up in French. Ada translated the lecture, adding a set of her own notes to explain how the machine worked and including her own computations for it. These notes took Ada nine months to write and were three times longer than the article itself! Ada had some awesome nicknames. She called herself “the Bride of Science” because of her desire to devote her life to science; Babbage called her “the Enchantress of Numbers” because of her seemingly magical math

Albert Einstein’s breakthrough theories on the nature of the universe made him the most famous “genius” of all time. Somehow, he had the ability to see what no one else could, to unravel mysteries that most others hadn’t even considered. His antipathy for authority allowed him to see through the haze of the “settled science,” and his childlike curiosity compelled him to continue searching for answers to these incomprehensible mysteries. But how was he so smart? Did he develop his analytical powers through diligent effort? It’s hard to fathom a level of genius like Albert Einstein’s, so it’s too easy to conclude he must have just been born with a special brain. Perhaps he was, we can’t know. But even so, not every seed sprouts. A child born with a misshaped head, slow to speak, and prone to violent temper tantrums, could have been written off before his abilities were ever recognized. He could have been mislabeled — and then lived up (or “down”?) to this label. What would we label a child who can’t pay attention in school, argues with the teacher, refuses to follow instructions, does poorly in most of his classes, and can’t remember his lessons? Fortunately though, for Albert Einstein — and the world — his loving, patient parents consistently endeavored to support and encourage their son’s exceptional independence and curiosity.

Shakespeare famously claimed that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” and this theatrical quality of life is nowhere more evident than in the social world. For the social world is not, and never will be, a world in which we reveal our true selves. Our total character is the product of our genes, our environment, and the interaction of the two, but who we are in public is only a slice of this totality. From very early in life, we learn to magnify the traits of our character most likely to produce social acceptance, while diminishing and hiding those traits which garner rejection or ridicule. This process leads to the creation of our social mask, or what can be called our persona, and as Carl Jung explains, the persona: “…is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, represents an office, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a product of compromise, in making which others often have a greater share than he.” Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology