Information

Information is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the person receiving it.

Quotes

A-L

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.
This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. ~ Buckminster Fuller

As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled. As it turns out, after the first 50,000-year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up—between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled.
As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point sometime around 2015 where human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam. ~ Alan Moore

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune. ~ Oscar Wilde

• In 2007, for the first time ever, more information was generated in one year than had been produced in the entire previous five thousand years - the period since the invention of writing.
  • Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, Sander Duivestein, Me the media: rise of the conversation society, VINT editions (research institute of Sogeti), 2009, p. 270.

• Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.
  • Anna C. Brackett, The Technique of Rest, Ch. 2 (1892).

• Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
  • Jean Baudrillard French semiologist. Cool Memories, Ch. 5 (1987, trans. 1990).

• Information is not a substance or concrete entity but rather a relationship between sets or ensembles of structured variety.
  • Walter F. Buckley (1967), Sociology and Modern Systems Theory p. 47.

• ... we simply try to give you all of the information about our businesses, in a large general way, that Charlie and I would want if our positions were reversed. ... The facts are out about what we do.
  • Warren Buffett, (June 28, 2018)"1996 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Warren Buffett Charlie Munger FULL Q&A". IDP, YouTube. (quote at 1:07:47 of 4:54:01)

• If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.
  • Ronald Coase, "How should economists choose?" Warren Nutter Lecture, 1981. Reprinted in Essays on Economics and Economists (1994) p. 27.

• Wisdom is dead. Long live information.
  • Mason Cooley (1927-2002), American academic and aphorist. City Aphorisms (1984).

• We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
  • Thomas Edison, As quoted in Golden Book (April 1931), according to Stevenson's Book of Quotations (Cassell 3rd edition 1938) by Burton Egbert Stevenson.

• The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear.
  This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand.
  We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.
  • Buckminster Fuller, in Cosmography : A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity (1992)

• people cannot take action if they don't have accurate information.
  • Amy Goodman The Exception to the Rulers written with David Goodman (2004)

• Information is not lost in black holes, but it is not returned in a useful way. It is like burning an encyclopaedia. Information is not lost, but it is very hard to read.
  • Stephen Hawking, Stephen Hawking Higgs Boson Particle

• The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information.
  • Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816) ME 14:384.

• Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
  • Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 18th April 1775.

• It used to be said that information is power. As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the board of the New York Times Co., rightly says, "Information is now ubiquitous. Power is understanding."
  • Martin Kaiser, in INFORMATION: The news will be exciting and so will the medium Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2 January 2000.

• There's no going back, and there's no hiding the information. So let everyone have it.
  • Andrew Kantor, as quoted in The Transparent Society, by David Brin, p. 1. Perseus Books Group, 1998.

• When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), American Science Fiction author. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ch. 3 (1969).

M-Z

• 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.
  • Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008, page 173 (ISBN 9781603580557).

• As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled. As it turns out, after the first 50,000-year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up—between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled.
  As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point sometime around 2015 where human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam.
  • Alan Moore, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, (2003)

• Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?
  • Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The folklore of computers and the true art of thinking, 1968, p. 19.

• What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
  • Herbert Simon, Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

• Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists.
  • Tom Stonier, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe: An Exploration into Information Physics, 1990, p. 21.

• You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information.
  • Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 8

• Data, seeming facts, apparent asso­ciations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all.
  • Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979), Ch. 1 : Laws and Theories

• Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.
  • Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950; 1954)

• Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
  • Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Sir Robert Chiltern, in An Ideal Husband, Act 1.

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