Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The Internet creates opportunities for small businesses but also overwhelms us with excessive information, leading to potential misinformation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb highlights the dual nature of the Internet. While it enables smaller entities to reach a global audience and compete in the marketplace, it also floods us with an overwhelming amount of information that can obscure truth and foster misunderstandings. This vast quantity of data can lead to harmful fallacies, suggesting that while we have unprecedented access to information, we need to navigate it wisely.
Themes
InternetTechnologyInformationBusinessFallacies
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a technology conference discussing the challenges of information overload.
More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All quotes →Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Similar quotes
It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Ray BradburyRead
The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.
J. K. RowlingRead
In a sense, communications networks can be defined entirely by who has cryptographic keys, and I think a lot of networks will work that way in the future.
Whitfield DiffieRead
I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.
Tim Berners-LeeRead
As we move into an era in which personal devices are seen as proxies for public needs, we run the risk that already-existing inequities will be further entrenched. Thus, with every big data set, we need to ask which people are excluded. Which places are less visible? What happens if you live in the shadow of big data sets?
Kate CrawfordRead
The truth is I've been doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter; there was no Internet. Social Media was writing letters, making phone calls, beating the bushes.
Spike LeeRead