Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Samuel Arbesman:

You can't just go fishing for correlations and hope they will explain the world. If you're not careful, you'll end up with spurious correlations. Even more important, to contend with the "why" of things, we still need ideas, hypotheses and theories. If you don't have good questions, your results can be silly and meaningless.

An exchange:

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.

Lawrence Lessig:

In the academy, there is no truth without a statistical regression. So few will risk reputation or promotion by speculating beyond the facts that SPSS will whisper.

But in the middle of a crisis, certainty is an expensive luxury, and one we can't afford anymore. We need to tackle the problems that explain most of our problems first, and soon.

Dan Geer:

We learned in the financial crisis that there are levels of achievable financial return that require levels of unsustainable financial risk. If we can, for the moment, think of data as a kind of money, then investing too much our own data in an institution too big to influence is just as insensate as investing too much of our own money in an institution too big to fail.

Only rarely do we ask our Legislatures to make mitigation effective. Instead, over and over again we ask our Legislatures to make failure impossible. When you embark on making failure impossible, and that includes delivering on statements like "Never again," you are forced into cost-benefit analyses where at least one of the variables is infinite. One is not anti-government to say that doing a good job at preventing terrorism is better than doing a perfect job.

Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith:

Obama asked: "What's the endgame?" and did not receive a convincing answer.