Tim Ferriss Quotes

It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. […] What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter *about* it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

Technology has enabled an environment where information is constantly fed to us on a real-time basis. You can't slow the feed of information, nor would you want to, but you can control and organize your consumption.

Information, if viewed from the point of view of food, is never a production issue. ... It's a consumption issue, and we have to start thinking about how we create diets [and] exercise.

People love information. Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don't know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore.

We are not the "free thinkers" we think we are. What we eat unavoidably impacts our physiology; the information we consume inevitably affects our opinions and perspectives. You cannot eat junk food with impunity; you cannot consume information without consequences.

[W]e spend so much time staring at our phones and screens, texting and tweeting about how busy we are, we no longer have the time to consume any primary material. We rely instead on the casual observations of our “friends” or the people we “follow” […].

Every company has messy data, and even the best of AI companies are not fully satisfied with their data. If you have data, it is probably a good idea to get an AI team to have a look at it and give feedback. This can develop into a positive feedback loop for both the IT and AI teams in any company.

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.

Digiphrenia - how technology lets us be in more than one place - and self - at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds - home and battlefield - simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed.

Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.

We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.

Big data is indeed a buzzword but it is one that is frankly under-hyped.

One of the myths about the Internet of Things is that companies have all the data they need, but their real challenge is making sense of it. In reality, the cost of collecting some kinds of data remains too high, the quality of the data isn't always good enough, and it remains difficult to integrate multiple data sources.

Here's why most campaigns get data wrong. They treat it as an afterthought and they treat it as sort of a logistic.

We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

What we have is a data glut.

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

Why don't I talk about Big Data? Because I am focused on intelligent answers and not speeds and feeds. It doesn't matter if it is quick if it's the wrong answer.

Certainly it's great to be able to talk to your friends about something. They might mention a film, and you can find all about it, and you don't have to wait months until you can find a book that might cover the subject and keep it in your head. You can have that kind of immediacy. But there's also something about it, where all the knowledge seems kind of fleeting. All the stuff I learn about in that way, I can be interested in for a day and then it's gone.

Information is bad for knowledge.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.