Quotes About Information

Dear Internet: One Billion Hysterical Opinions Do Not Carry the Weight of a Single Fact.

One can begin with the expansion of the source base available to scholars brought about by the digital revolution. When I began work on Reconstruction, the World Wide Web did not exist (nor did email, so that scholars wasted a lot less of their time than nowadays).

created specifically to separate the problem-solving tasks requiring access to a manufacturer's sticky solution information from those requiring access to users' sticky need information. The same basic principle can be illustrated in a less technical context: food design. In this field, manufacturer-based designers have traditionally undertaken the entire job of developing a novel food, and so they have freely blended need-specific design into any or all of the

technology-related information was associated in a significant

The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but "information" alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility.

Spraggett was never one to use a single sensational headline when two or three woud suffice.

Libraries should provide materials and information presenting to all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.

Today's young people suffer from an overdose of information processing and many of them are trying to come back from information to meaning processing to reinvent the meaning of their lives. Here again all they need is inner situational creativity.

what does the computer know of the comforting weight of a book in one's lap? Or of the excitement that comes from finding a set of books, dusty and tucked away in the back corner of some store? The computer can only reproduce the information in a book, and never the joyful experience of reading it.

Telephone books are, like dictionaries, already out of date the moment they are printed....

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

Cyberattacks are defined as "deliberate actions to alter, disrupt, deceive, degrade, or destroy computer systems or networks or the information and/or programs resident in or transiting these systems or networks."32 Put more simply, cyberattacks involve any activity that alters the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of information on digital systems.

The Defense Department, Carter said, had three core cyber missions: protecting military systems, networks, and information from attack; providing cyber capabilities to support military operations and contingency plans when needed; and defending the United States and its interests against "cyberattacks of significant consequence.

the lack of testing meant that intelligence analysts lacked robust feedback loops

One expert study called Russia's information warfare approach a "firehose of falsehood."114

In 2018, about two billion people, or two-thirds of the online population, had their personal information stolen or compromised.

In geopolitics, the same information is not available to everyone, regardless of how much time they have. Intelligence is in the business of unlocking other people's secrets and protecting our own. Asymmetric information is the name of the game. And in a world of asymmetric information, prediction is much more difficult and miscalculation much more likely.

Gen. Keith Alexander, once the nation's top cyberwarrior, called it "the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

Put most simply, intelligence is information that gives policymakers an advantage over their adversaries.

Knowledge never guarantees perfect decisions, but it does reduce uncertainty, which makes better decisions more likely.

People tend to seek and latch on to information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs while avoiding, disregarding, or minimizing evidence that challenges them.

The sheer volume of online data today is so staggering, it's hard to comprehend: in 2019, Internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent 294 billion emails, and posted 350 million photos on Facebook every day.29 Some estimate that the amount of information on earth is doubling every two years.30 This kind of publicly available information is called open-source intelligence and it is becoming increasingly valuable.