Benjamin Wittes Quotes

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

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

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

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.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Experts often possess more data than judgment.

Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society's most important tasks.

On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there.

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.

I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.

I think as we get older, as we get more mature and more experienced, we do realize it's like, 'blah, blah, blah,' oh there's the information I need, and then 'blah, blah, blah,' right? So we do this triage, I feel like, of what people say to us.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.

There is always a multitude of reasons both in favor of doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies in presenting them; the art of life lies in neglecting ninety-nine hundredths of them.

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

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.

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

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

People who lack the skill of discrimination tend to believe that everything is of relatively equal importance.

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

I think the most important thing that young people should be taught at school is how they can decide what they're being told is true.

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

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

It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

Expect only 5% of an intelligence report to be accurate.The trick of a good commander is to isolate the 5%.