"Buffett on Bridge" at Buffetcup.com (2013) http://archive.is/o4keX<!-- obsolete link — no longer posted at this page as of 2014·08·28: http://www.buffettcup.com/Default.aspx?tabid=69 // also quoted in "18 Reasons Why Wall Street Loves Bridge" by Lucas Kawa at Business Insider (1 January 2013) http://www.businessinsider.com/why-wall-street-plays-bridge-2012-12?op=1-->
Context: The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behaviour or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees.
Source: ARIS architecture and reference models for business process management (2000), p. 376.
“You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience.”
John Perry Barlow 2.0 (2004)
Context: You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment — the Internet — with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.
The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
Source: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
“It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.”
Source: Intrigues
Source: "Information Processing as an Integrating Concept in Organizational Design." 1978, p. 614
“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 3 “The Mad King” (p. 42)
Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)
Context: In the face of almost infinite useful knowledge, we have adopted the strategy of "information regeneration rather than information retrieval."... most importantly, you should be able to generate the result you need even if no one has ever done it before you—you will not be dependent on the past to have done everything you will ever need in mathematics.
Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
