Quotes about information

In the past, information was treasured... These days we live on the shore of an ocean of knowledge... with regular s that threaten out sanity.

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities.

You make a plan without intelligence—you might as well not have a plan at all.

Data are not the same as information. Before you can get the answers you want, you have to ask the right question.

But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.

Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come to [...] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible (without unreasonable levels of effort) decades from now.

“Truth and information are not the same thing. I promise you that’s a fact.”

“So you told yourself. But you have to admit that they do coincide often enough to let us all get around in the world safely.”

You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power.

Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for.

It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.