Quotes about Information

Technology is the use of increasingly accurate, self-evident, and reproducible information to replace energy and matter. 

The benefit of technology is NOT what it lets people accomplish, but in how it improves the character of people.

When technology becomes sufficiently obsolete, it becomes an art form.

The principal boast of electronic communication is speed, and speed doesn't help much in grasping the information - it doesn't matter if you learn about the greenhouse effects this week or next month.  What matters is that when you do hear about it you understand it so deeply and thoroughly that you begin to question the way you live.

But it is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

Talk of generosity, of information that wants to be free, and of virtual communities is often dismissed by businesspeople as youthful new age idealism. It may be idealistic but it is also the only sane way to launch a commercial economy in the emerging space.

Giving information that will help everybody live better. That's a teacher's dream—to accumulate information and disperse it in a form that allows people to choose the way they're going to use it. That's what I think I do best.

Life is information

I have a lot of energy. I have a great desire to absorb information. I'm not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at -- just walking around Williamsburg, for example -- is a great opportunity for ideas. I've been here before, I've seen things before, but now my eye gets keener and keener. So I can pick up little things: just the pattern of a brick walk, or the way they've attached a light to a house.

The purpose of education is not the accumulation of information in order to compete for success.  Education is the experience of being fully present to oneself and the world; it is transformation toward wholeness.

What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"; what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [(candle)] at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

I always looked for the CAUSE behind things and didn't fritter away my time analyzing EFFECTS. ALL KNOWLEDGE EXISTS as CAUSE. And it is simple. It is limited to LIGHT of MIND and the electric wave of motion which records God's thinking in matter. EFFECT is complex-infinitely complex - but one can have no KNOWLEDGE of effect. One can but be INFORMED of effect. Information is not knowledge. Our educational processes INFORM us but until we have recognized the eternal truth which underlies that information we have no knowledge of it. Like food in the grocery store, it is not nourishment until it is converted to the blood stream. ALL-KNOWLEDGE is possible for anyone - and the Cosmos gives it to him who asks but all information is impossible.

Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

The truth is that even in the information age, information is not enough. if all we needed were ideas and positive thinking, then we all would have had ponies when we were kids and we would all be living our "dream life" now. Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. In fact, the literal definition of the word "power" is "the ability to act."

 The Context-Age

Context has become absolutely essential to grasping what is taking place in society, no matter what the area of examination. Seeing the whole range of actions in a set pattern . . . is essential to understanding the specifics of what needs to be done. . .

Data, information and knowledge are levels of awareness along a continuous scale. Data are facts in isolation - the specific number of this, or the particular color of that. In common language, "Do you have the data?" means do you have specific, unconnected facts. Information emerges when data are combined to make a point about a topic. Again in common language, "information retrieval" means to acquire data within a specific category, or to piece together data in one category. Knowledge is information in context. In common language, "she's knowledgeable" means she has accumulated information within a larger context of theory or experience and has that learning at her disposal. All of this differ from wisdom, which would be knowledge in perspective.

The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems.

If someone tells you like you eat like a bird, the implication is that you don't eat much. Yet for their body weight, birds eat a lot. The peripatetic hummingbird, for example, eats the equivalent of 50 percent of its weight every day. (If you're a 200-pound male, imagine eating 100 pounds of food every day!)

Chances are no one will tell you that you poop like an elephant because elephants poop 165 pounds per day. So far you're probably thinking, "Guy is into the weirdest things. No wonder Apple had so many problems." However, there two are messages for revolutionaries in these biological facts.

First, a successful revolutionary relentlessly searches for, consumes, and absorbs knowledge, about the industry , customers, and competition. You do this by pressing the flesh of your customers, attending seminars and trade shows, reading journals, and browsing the internet.

Second, you need to spread the large amount of information knowledge that you've gained--pooping like an elephant. This means sharing information and discoveries with your fellow employees and occasionally even with your competitors.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Just because we increase the speed of information doesn't mean we can increase the speed of decisions. Pondering, reflecting and ruminating are undervalued skills in our culture.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive or gain by love and information. Force may subdue, but love gains. And one that forgives first wins the laurel.

Education, in its highest sense, is conscious training of mind or body to act unconsciously. It is conscious formation of mental habits, not mere acquisition of information.

People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create.

1. A big black bug bit a big brown bear. 2. Bring a bit of buttered brown bran bread. 3. Just which one he wants I don't know. 4. His daughter was going to New York to study law. 5. That's the question that really troubles him. 6. Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 7. Thou wouldst not play false yet wouldst wrongly win. 8. Amidst the mists and coldest frosts, With stoutest wrists and loudest boasts, He hits his fists against the posts, And still insists he sees the ghosts. 9. An Austrian army awfully arrayed, Boldly by battery besiege Belgrade; Cossack commanders cannonading come, Deal devastation's dire destructive doom; Ev'ry endeavor engineers essay, For fame, for freedom, fight, fierce, furious fray. Gen'rals 'gainst gen'rals grapple,-gracious God! How honors Heav'n heroic hardihood! Infuriate, indiscriminate in ill, Just Jesus, instant innocence instill! Kinsmen kill kinsmen, kindred kindred kill. Labor low levels longest, loftiest lines; Men march 'midst mounds, motes, mountains, murd'rous mines. Now noisy, noxious numbers notice nought, Of outward obstacle o'ercoming ought; Poor patriots perish, persecution's pest! Quite quiet Quakers "Quarter, quarter" quest; Reason returns, religion, religion, right, redounds, Suwarrow stop such sanguinary sounds! Truce to thee, Turkey, terror to thy train! Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine! Vanish vile vengeance, vanish victory vain! Why wish we warfare, wherefore welcome won Xerxes, Xantippus, Xavier, Xenophon? Yield, ye young Yaghier yeomen, yield your yell! Zimmerman's, Zoroaster's zeal Again attract; art against arms appeal. All, all ambitious aims, avaunt, away! Et caetera, et caetera, et caeterä.1 10. I am the very model of a model major-general, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical; I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical; I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical; About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot of news- With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse; . . . I'm very good at integral and differential calculus; I know the scientific names of beings animalculous; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral I'm the very model of a modern major-general.2 1 Anonymous, "Alliteration, or the Siege of Belgrade" Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 2 The Pirates of Penzance

There is a profound difference between information and meaning.

The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.

That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.

Under the [Communications Decency Act], a parent allowing her 17 year old to use the family computer to obtain information on the Internet that she, in her parental judgment, deems appropriate could face a lengthy prison term. . . . Similarly, a parent who sent his 17 year old college freshman information on birth control via e mail could be incarcerated even though neither he, his child, nor anyone in their home community, found the material "indecent" or "patently offensive," if the college town's community thought otherwise. The breadth of this content based restriction of speech imposes an especially heavy burden on the Government to explain why a less restrictive provision would not be as effective as the CDA. It has not done so.

At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for him or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence. Our political system and cultural life rest upon this ideal. Government action that stifles speech on account of its message, or that requires the utterance of a particular message favored by the Government, contravenes this essential right. Laws of this sort pose the inherent risk that the Government seeks not to advance a legitimate regulatory goal, but to suppress unpopular ideas or information or manipulate the public debate through coercion rather than persuasion.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."