Quotes About Information

All pieces of information are not equal in importance.

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. 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.

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation.

You can effortlessly look up accident statistics on the Web, but they do not easily come to mind. Note

that we depend on them for what information we need to obtain.

Journalists can teach us how to not learn.

As Sherlock Holmes noted in the Silver Blaze case—the curious thing was that the dog did not bark. More problematic, there are plenty of scientific results that are left out of publications because they are not statistically significant, but nevertheless provide information.

minimize time spent reading newspapers

Si veo a una mujer embarazada, el sexo del niño que lleva en su seno es para mí una cuestión puramente aleatoria (un 50% para cada sexo); pero no para el ginecólogo, que podría haber hecho una ecografía. En la práctica, la aleatoriedad es fundamentalmente información incompleta.

My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafés away from information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silence is far better.

why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?

The mechanism is a probabilistic method called conditional information: Unless the source of the statement has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him.

Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that carries through the centuries.

In fact we humans are very bad at filtering information, particularly short-term information, and procrastination can be a way for us to filter better, to resist the consequences of jumping on information, as we discuss next.

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.

we do not have the mental power to absorb all information and tend to be confused by details)

getting a lot of "timely" statistics are capable of overreacting and mistaking noise for information—

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal);

The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read.

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.

there is no way to derive profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically incorporated all the available information. Public information can therefore be useless

Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance.