Quotes About Information

So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression "garbage in, garbage out.

Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.

The captain strikes me as a competent officer, and competent officers are never given enough information to work with.

As far as the Internet was concerned, it didn't exist. And in this day and age, if the Internet says it doesn't exist, it's either dead boring or totally fascinating in a top secret men-in-black kind of way.

We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

That's what human relationships are about – selective sharing and hiding of information to the point of crazy confusion.

The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.

Facebook is now hiring. No need to apply, we already have all your details.

Warning: the internet may contain traces of nuts.

Most people know more about their own elected officials via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbors via conversation, and many know more about the celebrities via tabloids than they know about their own representatives via voting booklets.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

The plural of anecdote is data.

The great thing about television is that if something important happens anywhere in the world, day or night, you can always change the channel.

Businesses are beginning to realize that customer-focused empowerment of the work force is the key to world-class competitiveness in the information age.

Such innovation and learning will come only from people who are in touch with the voice of the customer and the voice of the process. It can not come from people who act only on instructions from top managers who are immersed in a fog of information about financial results.

people need to be reminded as much as they need to be informed.

The world is too complex, Simon argued, for our limited intelligence to understand fully. This means that very often the main problem we face in making a good decision is not the lack of information but our limited capability to process that information – a point nicely illustrated by the fact that the celebrated advent of the internet age does not seem to have improved the quality of our decisions, judging by the mess we are in today.

very often the main problem we face in making a good decision is not the lack of information but our limited capability to process that information

Hearsay was far more important than knowledge[...]for it is easier to appear knowledgeable than to become so.

To get away from poverty, you need several things at the same time: school, health, and infrastructure - those are the public investments. And on the other side, you need market opportunities, information, employment, and human rights.

Governments may know a lot more about our lives than we care to contemplate, but frequently they know less about the world than we presume.

Government just cannot govern well without reliable independent reporting and criticism. No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting; the cleverest agents of the secret police state are inferior to the plodding reporter of the democracy.

Jefferson said he only read the advertisements in the newspaper, because it was there he was most likely to find the truth.

A female war correspondent so popular that she had some credibility in saying she controlled half of her newspaper's circulation approached General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War with information that could help him. He was unwilling to get help from someone in petticoats.