Quotes About Information

The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from peoples heads

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting).

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.

In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.

Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears. I will return to this point in time.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. Why?

Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

We are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

The supply of information to which we are exposed thanks to modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow into the neurotic first one. […] the second fellow reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.

We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical

The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin. People

Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.