Neal Stephenson Quotes

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom…

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

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

Facts are the words of God, and we may heap them together endlessly, but they will teach us little or nothing till we place them in their true relations, and recognize the thought that binds them together.

It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.

Whoever would like to look and see what someone is saying behind all the show, glitter, scenery, whatever it may be, and see what ideas are being expressed beyond and below and above that, can do that, as well.

This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.

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

I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting.

I try to minimize the noise, and I don't use Facebook except for my fan page, and I don't look at anything. It's getting a lot easier.

The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.

When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages. I would record TV commercials with SoundRecorder.exe on Windows 95 and reverse them to see if I was being subliminally influenced to watch Pokémon by Japanese spies.

Don't buy the toys that make the noise!

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it.

Data really powers everything that we do.

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

If everything is amplified, we hear nothing.

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.

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.' Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?' That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.

You collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.

Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.