Quotes About Information

and news shared with millions gives you no real advantage.

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time

Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. if every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.

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.

Some books cannot be summarized; some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

Modernity provides too many variables (but too little data per variable), and the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information, as noise is convex and information is concave. Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.

A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

I prefer to remain a skeptic. People frequently misinterpret my opinion. I never said that every rich man is an idiot and every unsuccessful person unlucky, only that in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one's judgment. It is safer. Ten • LOSER TAKES ALL—ON THE NONLINEARITIES OF LIFE The nonlinear viciousness of life.

Anyone who listens to news is one step below sucker.

Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.

A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself.

The demand today is for people with knowledge.

Knowledge is more widely disseminated and freely available than ever before, making it much easier for people to operate at higher levels of consciousness in their work and consequently to be more productive.

With his industrial connections, he gathered information on Norwegian firms and how they were helping the Germans. Norsk Hydro was but one focus of many.

The Germans now wanted to increase heavy water production to five thousand kilograms a year, and Paul Harteck, whom Tronstad knew from Cambridge, was on his way to advise on new methods to obtain such levels. Realizing the importance of conveying this information to the British, but with Skylark B in jeopardy, Tronstad found a courier—a man planning to escape by boat to Scotland the following week.

because television had become the primary means through which people appropriated the world, it promulgated an epistemology in which all information, whatever the source, was forced to become entertainment.

People can read anything, but no one does. All they do is play games and watch cat holograms.

KNOWLEDGE IS POW

At lunchtime (10:24 p.m.) I went out and bought the L.A. Times.

The "money game" we still call investment management evolved in recent decades from a winner's game to a loser's game because a basic change occurred in the investment environment: The market came to be overwhelmingly dominated by investment professionals—all knowing the same superb information, having huge computer power, and striving to win by outperforming the market they collectively completely dominate.

a lie can run around the internet before the truth has logged on to facebook

Gone were the days when Americans were forced to pick one of three nightly news broadcasts. Now there are so many outlets that we suddenly have the ability to find the source of news that makes us the least uncomfortable.

The internet's vast interconnectivity made it possible for everyone to hear everyone else—and to be heard by everyone else. This is perhaps the most important and radical change wrought by digital information.