Quotes About Information

Today's social media have a massive and almost instantaneous ability to bring the pressure to conform on any selected target. If an end is seen as "good," justifying the means to achieve it is simply a matter of marketing. And this invites a subtle, chronic kind of lying—the editing and massaging of information—to get the results claimed to be needed. This

Orwell was wrong. You don't need repression. You need only the sensory overload of an age of numbingly ephemeral social media.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Somebody told me when I first got in this business that people believe what they read until somebody prints something that contradicts it. Then they believe both.

People believe what they read until someone prints something that contradicts it. Then they believe both.

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed.

Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably underestimated and largely underemployed.

To live in today's world is not only to have access to all the best that has come before, but also to have a breadth and ease of access that is incomparably greater than that enjoyed even by our parents, let alone earlier generations.

In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate's haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge.

It's not that there is less information on television than there once was. In fact, there is so much information that "fact" is now defined as something believed by so many people that television notices their belief, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

The flip side of this is that any information that can be reduced to a choice among two or more possibilities can be expressed using bits. Needless

That rare person who has 1,073,741,824 bytes of memory will say, "I've got a gig (and I'm not talking music).

In the same way that Morse code reduces written language to dots and dashes, the spoken version of the code reduces speech to just two vowel sounds. The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all types of information.

Just as Morse code provides a good introduction to the nature of codes, the telegraph provides a good introduction to the hardware of the computer.

The primary office of a newspaper is the gathering of news… comment is free, but facts are sacred.

The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.

We tend to shy away from data that challenges our assumptions, that erodes our preconceptions. Getting rid of our wrong ideas is a painful and difficult process, yet it's that very process that makes data truly useful. A fact becomes information when it challenges our assumptions. These challenges are the raw material that forces our ideas to evolve, our tastes to change, our minds to grow.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. —WILLIAM THOMSON, LORD KELVIN

With news and data that is tailored to our prejudices, we deprive ourselves of true information. We wind up wallowing in our own false ideas, reflected back at us by the media. The news is ceasing to be a window unto the world; it is becoming a mirror that allows us to gaze only upon our own beliefs.

A bad idea, a wrong piece of information, a digital brain-altering virus can spread at the speed of light through the internet and quickly find a home among a dispersed but digitally interconnected group of true believers. This group acts as a reservoir for the bad idea, allowing it to gather strength and reinfect people; as the group grows, the belief, no matter how crazy, becomes more and more solidly established among the faithful.

Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisibly hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone, giving up your valuable time, money, or information in return for little or nothing at all.

It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them.