Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

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.

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)

[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.

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

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

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?

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.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

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.

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

The problem with Google is you have 360 degrees of omnidirectional information on a linear basis, but the algorithms for irony and ambiguity are not there. And those are the algorithms of wisdom.

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

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.

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.

As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.

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

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

Information cannot serve as an effective substitute for thinking.

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

Information work is thinking work.