Quotes About Information

In a provocative move, the first issue of her periodical, Woman Rebel announced an intention to disperse contraceptive information. When the postal authorities declared this issue "obscene," Sanger avoided having it confiscated by mailing it in small batches all over the city. As subscriptions poured in, the post office declared five other issues unmailable.

The message of this book is: There's nothing to be afraid of. Pornography is part of a healthy free flow of information about sex. This is information our society badly needs. It is a freedom women need.

Creo que a veces tener demasiada información puede ser muy malo. Fuerza nuestra atención a vagar sin rumbo, hasta que ya no sabemos dónde tenemos la cabeza y no somos capaces de ver lo que tenemos delante de las narices

May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

The closer to the source, the purer the information."

The further away from the source, the more contaminated the information is."

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2.

You can feel Simon's impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the

optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. One

They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.

La situación proporciona la ocasión; esta da al experto acceso a información almacenada en la memoria, y la información da la respuesta. La intuición no es ni más ni menos que el reconocimiento».

Overconfidence is another manifestation of WYSIATI: when we estimate a quantity, we rely on information that comes to mind and construct a coherent story in which the estimate makes sense. Allowing for the information that does not come to mind—perhaps because one never knew it—is impossible.

As Nassim Taleb has argued, inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.

The associative machine is set to suppress doubt and to evoke ideas and information that are compatible with the currently dominant story. A mind that follows WYSIATI will achieve high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know. It is therefore not surprising that many of us are prone to have high confidence in unfounded intuitions.

I quoted Herbert Simon's definition of intuition in the introduction, but it will make more sense when I repeat it now: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

overconfidence is a direct consequence of features of System 1 that can be tamed—but not vanquished. The main obstacle is that subjective confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed, not by the quality and amount of the information that supports it.

the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment.

Inducing good moods makes people more receptive to bullshit and more gullible in general; they are less apt to detect deception or identify misleading information. Conversely, eyewitnesses who are exposed to misleading information are better able to disregard it—and to avoid false testimony—when they are in a bad mood.

Facts that we know do not always come to mind when we need them. People

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.