Musings of an Analyst

Years ago, one of my mentors shared the line above as being the summary in an appendix of a book on numerical analysis that he had studied years before our conversation. The full line was “verily I say unto thee, ye compute for insight. Thy numbers are but chaff.”

I often reflect on that idea. It is analogous, in my opinion, to George Box’s famous quote “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” I personally find that I often understand things by building a model and exercising it. What matters? Why?

More years ago than I care to count today, I got the opportunity to take a class on lessons learned in engineering. In that class, one of the big lessons was that “Robust design is based on our understanding of sensitivities, uncertainties,
and margins.” For decision analysis, I often reframe the question into looking at how wrong I could be on different dimensions and then assessing whether the best decision would change if things were as different as they could be from that best estimate.

and margins