Information Theory Quotes

#1. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

James Gleick

#2. Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: information theory.

James Gleick

#3. All communication is manipulation," Jedao said. "You're a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.

Yoon Ha Lee

#4. The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.

Rudolf Arnheim

#5. Information Theory would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid dynamics would inform the hull of a ship.

Neal Stephenson

#6. Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

William A. Dembski

#7. To put it in terms of information theory, the new technology overwrites the old one. The technology saved under a new file name survives as a new species.

Koji Suzuki

#8. A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can't guarantee outcomes ... in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge

George Gilder

#9. If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed.

Hans Christian Von Baeyer

#10. In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content.

Hans Christian Von Baeyer

#11. A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.

James Gleick

#12. Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message.

Hans Christian Von Baeyer

#13. I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.

James Gleick

#14. It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with "randomness". Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information.

Edwin Thompson Jaynes

#15. The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

Alfred North Whitehead

#16. I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.

Pierre Omidyar

#17. Singh in computational biology held forth on her theory of the protomolecule as a Guzman-style quantum computer one night over dinner, and when Kibushi used the information without citing her, she snuck into the showers at the gymnasium and beat him to death with a ceramic workbench cap.

James S.A. Corey

#18. The use of 'conspiracy theory' as a derogatory - as an epithet almost - is something the propagandists have perfected over the decades, and it's a useful tool for eliminating articulate dissent and other points of view, and information that might be inconvenient for a policy agenda.

Chris Sanders

#19. The market always, in theory at least, looks ahead. And it's always trying to take in every bit of information that it can as quickly as it can. You don't really care so much if the company made a dollar last year; you want to know what it's going to make this year.

Alex Berenson

#20. A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution.

Richard Arnold Epstein

#21. The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow".

Anatol Rapoport

#22. Without the physical world, Ideas will not exist.

Joey Lawsin

#23. Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.

Nate Silver

#24. The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.

Anatol Rapoport

#25. There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

Noam Chomsky

#26. Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#27. While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#28. The 1970s was the decade of developments in the new area of information economics. Search theory, which emphasized the need to gather information, was joined by models that featured asymmetric information, the case in which information differed across individual agents.

Dale T. Mortensen

#29. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#30. Knowledge is theory. We should be thankful if action of management is based on theory. Knowledge has temporal spread. Information is not knowledge. The world is drowning in information but is slow in acquisition of knowledge. There is no substitute for knowledge.

W. Edwards Deming

#31. In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience

Albert Bandura

#32. Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information.

Henry Mintzberg

#33. I do not believe in censorship, but I believe we already have censorship in what is called marketing theory, namely the only information we get in mainstream media is for profit.

Sam Sheppard

#34. Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Edward Tufte