15 Quotes by Douglas W. Hubbard

Two good indicators of revealed preferences are things the people tend to value a lot: time and money. If you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money, you can infer quite a lot about their real preferences.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man. – Bertrand Russell.

Perhaps the biggest misconception some managers may run into is the belief that correlation proves causation. The fact that one variable is correlated to another does not necessarily mean that one variable causes the other. If church donations and liquor sales are correlated, it is not because of some collusion between clergy and the liquor industry. It is because both are affected by how well the economy is doing.

If you know almost nothing, almost anything will tell you something.

The fact is that the preference for ignorance over even marginal reductions in ignorance is never the moral high ground.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.