Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

It is my job to know the difference between information and intelligence.

You cannot be insightful if you're deluged with information.

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

I'm not a big believer in doing too much research - I think you can get lost in it. You can get constrained by it, which I think is a mistake. But if you've done your homework, the audience feels it.

Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with.

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom…

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life.

We are drowning in information.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

If you want to become a biologist, it doesn't help to go into the Harvard biology library and all the information is there for you. You have to know what to look for and the internet is the same, just magnified.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.