Quotes About Information

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical.

In effect, since the process of natural selection is one of extracting useful information from the environment and encoding it in the genes, there is a sense in which you can look on the human genome as four billion years' worth of accumulated learning.

book is a piece of digital information, written in linear, one-dimensional and one-directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large lexicon of meanings through the order of their groupings.

The way we consume information leads us to think less and less about more and more. We spend much of our time fixated on secondary questions (usually related to controversial and sensational issues) and very little time exploring the primary questions about our brief stay here on earth.

Fox News isn't something you can tune out, like a game show or a cable movie you've seen a dozen times. The colors, the moving logos, the giant fonts, the . . . well . . . the things they actually say. It's like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead.

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

We now live in a world where the most valuable skill you can sell is knowledge.

Joe looked at the name on Axe's BlackBerry and then turned to me. "Who the hell is Sarah Palin?

A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices – not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.

knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

In a...media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter...Information [can] become a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

Holding and synthesizing information in your brain creates your personality. You're surrendering your personality to an electronic device in your pocket.

Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.

What is new is that we now know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we're left with a desperate sense that all of it is exploding, all the time.

Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let's us be better than those guys so we can hate on them. Our school had two computers in the library, one that worked.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era . . . governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of every one of us. —Julian Assange

As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, "Ads are what we know about the world around us.

The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others.

If people want real information, they have to go beyond advertising to disinterested sources such as Consumer Reports.

The availability heuristic says that we assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. This heuristic is partly true. In general, the frequency of experience does affect its availability to memory. But frequency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. Salience or vividness matters as well.

When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it's true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are to hear it. This is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mistaken, consensus.

When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of "satisficing" in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.

information costs," is not the way to maximize one's investment. The true maximizer would determine just how much information seeking was the amount needed to lead to a very good decision.

If you live in a social world, as we all do, you are always being hit with information about how others are doing.