Quotes About Information

News is something worth knowing that you didn't know already. (by an "earnest young woman" in his journalism class)

When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

Tellingly, Ralf has revealed himself as an Internet sceptic. One suspects he thinks the World Wide Web has made things too easy for people, certainly too easy to 'pollute' the world with the meaningless and the inconsequential. 'I am not a fan of the Internet, I think it's overrated. Intelligent information is still intelligent information and an overflow of nonsense does not really help. In Germany it's called Datenmüll: data rubbish.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.

there are several distinct types of networks of exchange, each with its own typical range and characteristics. The main types that they identify are bulk-goods networks, prestige-goods networks, political/military networks, and information networks.

Within a single information network, processes of collective learning may be more or less powerful in different regions; it is thus possible to imagine regions in which more information is pooled, in greater variety and in greater concentrations, than in other regions. These arguments suggest a useful general principle: the size, diversity, and efficiency of information networks should be an important large-scale determinant of rates of ecological innovation.

Accounting is your primary information system for making decisions, so if that information is bad, your decisions will be bad too.

We're all photojournalists now. It's no longer enough just to write.

Are we playing Faster Fingers or are we thinking?" Faster Fingers was their code for supplanting brain/memory with Google Search.

Information is always being left out, therefore, when speech is written down. And conversely, information is always being added when a written text is spoken aloud.

Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

Many times information was most effective when it wasn't used. The same was true of any other weapon.

In this age of media and Internet access, we are much more talkative than ever before.

Don't believe everything you read.

Availability bias prevents us from setting our prior beliefs appropriately, whereas confirmation bias stops us from updating them for new information.

But few of us really stop to ask ourselves what new information might change our minds, especially on questions of politics and identity. We fall into the trap of confirmation bias, in which rather than updating our prior beliefs, we mould new information into a form that will confirm them.

The brain has conflicting goals: to provide you with information, and to reduce your anxiety about the worrying outcome. If you wanted Clinton to win in 2016, your brain achieved both goals by accepting the 30% figure but telling you it would not happen.

Listening to sermons and reading the Bible provide information about Jesus, but this is not the same as a personal meeting of him in the events of his life.

By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which you consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002).

With Evernote Web Clipper you can see the information that you may have saved earlier automatically. For instance, if you are looking for a specific movie or quote, and you have saved the same or something similar in your Evernote account, it will show up on your results. You wouldn't even need to open the program in your computer or Evernote on

A slightly different version of the argument--this is really the core of Max Weber's reflections on the subject--is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information.

But it's crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that's now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.

a "negative correlation," as David Apter put it,55 between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything—which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret police.