Richard Russo Quotes

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.

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

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

You have to put together bits and pieces of information before you can draw overall conclusions.

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.

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

I think it's true we look forward to enormous amounts of information, but I think we would be better off if we thought about the kinds of wisdom and thoughtfulness that we need in order to handle the amount of information ahead.

Good intelligence analysis, after all, is all about discrimination between what's important and what's not.

Information cannot serve as an effective substitute for thinking.

[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Information work is thinking work.

Sometimes one must make extended conclusions from limited data.

I think there's data, and then there's information that comes from data, and then there's knowledge that comes from information. And then, after knowledge, there is wisdom. I am interested in how to get from data to wisdom.

It is difficult finding intelligence that is actionable in a lot of these places, but we have to keep trying.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.