Information Prioritization Quotes

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The cure to information overload is more information.

When people do not ignore what they should ignore, but ignore what they should not ignore, this is known as ignorance.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their [bleeping] Representatives are.

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

Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't.

I think e-mail should be sorted by importance, not by time.

I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with thosewhich are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation.

The preface? Why would he waste time with the preface? Skip the preface and move on to the meat of the thing!

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.

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

Don't know if it's good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

That's the thing about the internet. It's really good at giving you pointless facts like how many horses a star owns, but not important things like how to invade his trailer.

The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.