Sublime

direct our societies are far too smart to ban news; they just give us ever more of it so that we will lose any ability to see what is really happening.

“For example, with restaurant inspection data in a machine-readable and rapidly updated format on New York City’s Open Data platform, Yelp now informs customers on the cleanliness of their favorite restaurants,” he told me.

The Spanish Data Protection Agency recognized that not all information is worthy of immortality. Some information should be forgotten because that is only human.

As the size of datasets balloons almost beyond the scope of our imagination, it becomes all the more important to continually audit them to check for the possibility of error.

Information flows faster and is everywhere. Human memory is slowly becoming obsolete.

Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine—but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.