Quotes About Relevance

All pieces of information are not equal in importance.

The fallacy is that what one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn't mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend (IYI-style) to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism.

but that is not where the significance of the story lies.

Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it.

Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono già morte.

the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.

The overlap between newspapers was so large that you would get less and less information the more you read. Yet everyone was so eager to become familiar with every fact that they read every freshly printed document and listened to every radio station as if the great answer was going to be revealed to them in the next bulletin.

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal);

Significant signals have a way to reach you.

and news shared with millions gives you no real advantage.

good news is good news first; how good matters rather little.

How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts.

10 year old books feel very aged, out of place, out of sync. 200 year old books feel contemporary. 2000 year old books feel fresh.

they were of no use to anyone outside IBM.

Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

Unless something moves by more than its usual daily percentage change, the event is deemed to be noise. Percentage moves are the size of the headlines. In addition, the interpretation is not linear; a 2% move is not twice as significant an event as 1%, it is rather like four to ten times. A 7% move can be several billion times more relevant than a 1% move!

So not only can the past be misleading, but there are also many degrees of freedom in our interpretation of past events.

Ideas do matter and do have consequences.

If you have to ask then you don't deserve an answer.

I care, I tell her. Because if there's one thing I know about the news, it's that it decides for most people --including the federal government-- what is and what isn't important.

very few of the jobs are necessary, since they could all be accomplished by machines—but the illusion of purpose is critical to a well-adjusted population.

There's the answer, but an answer means nothing if the world doesn't first hear the question.

But like so many things, once we had possession of infinite knowledge, it suddenly seemed less important. Less urgent. Yes, we know everything, but I often wonder if anyone bothers to look at all that knowledge

When it came to the human race, there was no more left to learn. Nothing about our own existence to decipher. Which meant that no one person was important than any other. In fact in the ground scheme of things, everyone was equally useless