Quotes About Information

When you combine the judgments of a large group of people to calculate the "wisdom of the crowd" you collect all the relevant information that is dispersed among all those people. But none of those people has access to all that information. One person knows only some of it, another knows some more, and so on.

Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs.

But groups also let people share information and perspectives. That's good. It helps make dragonfly eye work, and aggregation is critical to accuracy.

A forecaster who doesn't adjust her views in light of new information won't capture the value of that information, while a forecaster who is so impressed by the new information that he bases his forecast entirely on it will lose the value of the old information that underpinned his prior forecast. But the forecaster who carefully balances old and new captures the value in both—and puts it into her new forecast. The best way to do that is by updating often but bit by bit.

No other army in history had made such an extended campaign nor had any previous expedition discovered and recorded so much new information about distant lands and peoples.

While 76 per cent of Americans said they watched, read or heard the news on a daily basis, only 41 per cent said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there's this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge about anything, but believing you know everything.

three hours of this time (202 minutes) is spent entirely focused on electronic media. Only fifty-two minutes—or 7 percent of the day—is spent reading books and other printed media. The

The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent...The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.

Uki Goni's excellent book The Real Odessa for much of my information about Nazis in Argentina.

The nerds have taken over the newsrooms.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon provides one of the simplest definitions of curiosity: the feeling of deprivation that comes from an information gap between what we know and what we want to know. Separately

I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation.

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.

The modern information age would never have been possible without the work of the great logician Frege. Female suffrage was taken seriously only after Wollstonecraft. The Enlightenment stood in need of a Voltaire, Einstein needed Newton and Newton, in turn, relied on Aristotle. The history of social, political and technological change is inextricably bound to the history of thought.

what makes these superforecasters so good. It's not really who they are. It is what they do. Foresight isn't a mysterious gift bestowed at birth. It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs. These habits of thought can be learned and cultivated

A criminal trial is not a search for truth. It is much too circumscribed for that. Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve. It is a quest for a verdict in which information is selected and screened (we can almost say "processed") before it is allowed to reach jurors.

Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we're never caught up with our lives.

many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize.

The cure to eliminate fake news is that people stop reading 140-character tweets and start reading 600-page books.

Instant telecommunication allows better and updated information, lessons learnt and problems encountered to be exchanged and debated, it alerts us more quickly to problems and brings to many households around the world visions and information which hopefully spur us to action.

I started using my blog to get information about cities I was about to visit, asking followers what the main problems there were. Many mentioned misconduct of politicians and other things I wanted to talk about during my shows. Then, before a show in one city, local politicians called saying they would sue if I said something unpleasant.

Never Googled myself. I use a computer for market quotes and news, but I've never Googled myself. But I have visited their headquarters.

In 2003, Congress authorized the construction of a visitor center for the Vietnam Memorial to help provide information and educate the public about the memorial and the Vietnam War.