Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

For the theory-practice iteration to work, the scientist must be, as it were, mentally ambidextrous; fascinated equally on the one hand by possible meanings, theories, and tentative models to be induced from data and the practical reality of the real world, and on the other with the factual implications deducible from tentative theories, models and hypotheses.

Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

The only way to know how a complex system will behave-after you modify it-is to modify it and see how it behaves.

The management system which makes only a pretense of valuing employee involvement and encouraging employee empowerment merely breeds cynicism.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.