Quotes About Information

The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it's slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once. The subconscious, meanwhile, is far more efficient. It can process more data in much shorter time frames. In ecstasis, the conscious mind takes a break, and the subconscious takes over.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

In nature's talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.

the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you're committed to progress, you can't very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence. The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune maybe no one's fault.

people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later. Topic-then-comment and given-then-new orderings are major contributors to coherence, the feeling that one sentence flows into the next rather than jerking the reader around.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.

Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

The information contained in a pattern depends on how coarsely or finely grained our view of the world is.

Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether:

Rather, there is friction between the speaker's square peg and the listener's round hole, and that friction itself conveys information in a parallel stream.

Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I'll turn to in the final chapter.)

The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability. If that sounds mystical or paradoxical, think about the probability that a coin I just flipped landed heads. For you, it's .5. For me, it's 1 (I peeked). Same event, different knowledge, different probability.

Once again, it's good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.

aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

The emotion, and the other aspect is that this relate to many different obstacle in life. Emotion, yes, I love emotion, for your information, very much so.

The mind remembers only certain things. The body remembers everything. The information it carries goes back to the beginning of existence.

I love that the world is data intensive … unfortunately, it's called 'Big Data.'