Quotes About Information

Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.

Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision. Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.

Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn't trainable or that you're not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.

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If our only options are being 100% right or 100% wrong, with nothing in between, then information that potentially contradicts a belief requires a total downgrade, from right all the way to wrong. There is no "somewhat less sure" option in an all-or-nothing world, so we ignore or discredit the information to hold steadfast in our belief.

Accountability, like reinforcement of accuracy, also improves our decision-making and information processing when we are away from the group because we know in advance that we will have to answer to the group for our decisions.

When we think probabilistically, we are less likely to use adverse results alone as proof that we made a decision error, because we recognize the possibility that the decision might have been good but luck and/ or incomplete information (and a sample size of one) intervened.

Of course, the world is uncertain and the world does change. That means that our goals ought to change in response. But the goals we set are remarkably unresponsive to new information.

We have the intuition that when the world tells us our beliefs need updating, when new information conflicts with a belief we have, we will resolve that conflict by changing our belief. But all too often, like the cult members, we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior belief and stick to it.

But the goals we set are remarkably unresponsive to new information.

Natural language terms that express likelihoods, like "very likely" and "unlikely," are useful but blunt instruments. The drive to improve on your initial estimates is what motivates you to check your information and learn more. If you hide behind the safety of a general term, there's no reason to improve on it or calibrate

The size of the range signals what you know and what you don't know. The larger the range, the less information or the lower the quality of the information informing your estimate, and the more you need to learn. Communicating the size of the range also signals to others that you need their knowledge and perspective to narrow the range.

The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them.

The next time that you find yourself saying, "I'm just not ready to decide yet," what you should actually say is "For now I think that the status quo is still the best choice." Maybe you need more information to know whether to switch. But what shouldn't stop you from quitting (or getting that information) is that it's too scary to switch because loss aversion is too intense.

It doesn't take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief.

This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

The first set of principles lays out some habits of mind we would do well to adopt, starting with this one: whenever possible, we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world.

Great weight should be given to the judgment of professionals on what information, if disclosed, would harm national security.

We put people of concern on the watch list or the no-fly list, so we have a number of layers of security beyond the airport checkpoint. We gather as much information about a passenger as the law allows without profiling.

In general, you don't want competitors to understand your business outside of telling people your revenue and profitability numbers.

News may not be very profitable anymore, but it sure is popular.

I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space.

If you watch the news and don't like it, then this is your counter program to the news.

I don't try to sensationalize anybody. I'm not trying to entertain. I'm trying to give information and give access to me and tell about our program.