Quotes & Sayings About Information Systems

Further, we have to ask if community is possible when, as noted earlier, social media is so based on self. 'For all the rhetoric about cyber-community, the internet is less a forum for shared public life than an area for individuals to express their egos and find information in tune with their personal needs and desires.'

Further, 'Instead of renewing community, these ever expanding cybernetic systems tend to band people together in like-minded or similarly interested groups. They equip us with new means of pursuing our own interests more than they nurture communities of diverse people who nevertheless seek shared lives and common ends.'

Schultze, Habits — Kyle Tennant

Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

It's impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned "talk-tapes" in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegan's Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until a century after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever. — Philip K. Dick

Our system is not fit for purpose. It's inadequate in terms of its scope, it's inadequate in terms of its information technology, leadership, management systems and processes. — John Richard Reid

Knowledge is the essence of organized information systems. Wisdom is the essence of knowledge and experience. — Debasish Mridha

We can also monitor signals coming from within our body. This is, again, the foundation of Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis (see Chapter 5). The most specific of these are signals from the somatosensory system, which transmits information about touch, temperature, irritation, and pain from skin and muscles to cortical processing areas, much like the visual or auditory systems do. When you have a headache, backache, sore muscles, an itch, feel warmth or cool air on your skin, or are feverish, you become aware of somatosensory information being processed in cortical areas. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming." — J. C. R. Licklider

Each time we go through a major life change (getting married or divorced, moving, having a family, switching careers, starting a new business, going back to school), we experience a breakdown of our organizational systems. It's inevitable-we are dealing with a new set of realities-and it takes time to process the information and to actually see what there is to organize. — Julie Morgenstern

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer. — Edward Snowden

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*! — Alastair Reynolds

Empires are synonymous with centralized if occasionally schismatized hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through usually a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser as a rule nominally independent power systems. In short, it's all about dominance. — Iain Banks

Asana and complementary services are bringing the evolved team brain to the entire world. In great companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, people already add information to and extract insight from these systems much the same way our hands and brain exchange signals. — Justin Rosenstein

This thing called Contrmporary America--and its obsession with televisions, game systems, and computers_has gone a littlr far if you ask me. Some call it the Information Age, but I'd tend to say it's more the Sitting-on-one's-butt-and-letting-other-people-do-the-thinking-for-you Age. — James Patterson

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems. — George Gilder

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems. — Heinz Pagels

To date, there is no strong empirical support for claims that automating medical record keeping will lead to major reductions in health-care costs or significant improvements in the well-being of patients. But if doctors and patients have seen few benefits from the scramble to automate record keeping, the companies that supply the systems have profited. Cerner Corporation, a medical software outfit, saw its revenues triple, from $1 billion to $3 billion, between 2005 and 2013. Cerner, as it happens, was one of five corporations that provided RAND with funding for the original 2005 study. The other sponsors, which included General Electric and Hewlett Packard, also have substantial business interests in health-care automation. As today's flawed systems are replaced or upgraded in the future, to fix their interoperability problems and other shortcomings, information technology companies will reap further windfalls. — Nicholas Carr

An effective technology advocate is someone who possesses strong communication skills and who has the respect of his or her colleagues. The technology advocate needs to be able to communicate with both the Office of Technology & Information Systems and their colleagues about various technology projects and plans. The building technology advocate will facilitate communication between your department and the staff at his or her building. A technology advocate does not need to be the most tech-savvy person in the building, but a good understanding of technology is vital for success in the position. — Mike Daugherty

Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere. — Arthur Miller

Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specified amount of time has passed or other conditions are met. — Jonathan Zittrain

We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements. — Tony Scott

Even the best data security systems can't protect private taxpayer information from entrepreneurial foreign businesses than can make huge profits selling U.S. taxpayer information. — Melissa Bean

Churches are notorious for creating competing systems, wherein unclear direction and conflicting information threaten to cause a breakdown and paralyze the ministry. Instead of replacing old systems, we tend to just download and add whatever is new to what already exists. Soon our capacity becomes fragmented and we find ourselves confronted with the signs of ineffectiveness: some ministries seem routine and irrelevant; the teaching feels too academic; calendars are saturated with mediocre programs; staff members pull in opposite directions; volunteers lack motivation; departments viciously compete for resources; and it becomes harder and harder to figure out if we are really being successful. Too many churches desperately need an upgrade. They need to reformat their hard drives and install a clean system. They need to rewrite their code so everyone is clear about what is important and how they should function. — Andy Stanley

Informatics is the field of medicine that concerns itself with "the interactions among and between humans and information tools and systems." In 2013, it became an official specialty, like cardiology or obstetrics, with its own board certification. — Robert Wachter

New information technologies-including email, the web, and computerized blast-faxes and phone calls-have fundamentally changed the landscape of political competition in modern democracies. They've done so in three ways: by dramatically boosting the access of individuals and special interests to politically potent information, by making it easier for such people to coordinate their activities and exert political power, and by greatly increasing the pace of events within our political systems. — Thomas Homer-Dixon

information systems will streamline many of them for people living in those countries, such as integrated clothing machines (washing, drying, folding, pressing and sorting) that keep an inventory of clean clothes and algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user's daily schedule. Haircuts will finally be automated and machine-precise. — Eric Schmidt

Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption, and secure access devices and it's money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, operate and account for computer systems that contain protected information. — Kevin Mitnick

The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole. — Stanislav Grof

The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems. — David Bornstein

How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological? In what way is subjectivity becoming a precarious condition of interface between rationalized systems of exchange and networks of information? — Jonathan Crary

... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names - otherwise you would be selling nothing - like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering". — Edsger Dijkstra

Cerner's focus over the last 20 years has been to provide healthcare, predominately healthcare providers, with advanced clinical and management information systems. Our mission is to connect the appropriate persons, knowledge, and resources at the appropriate time and location to achieve the optimal health outcome. — Neal Patterson

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data. — Alex Berenson

I would never talk just to be social. Now, to sit down with a bunch of engineers and talk about the latest concrete forming systems, that's really interesting. Talking with animal behaviorists or with someone who likes to sail, that's interesting. Information is interesting to me. But talking for the sake of talking, I find that quite boring. — Temple Grandin

Don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information. — Julian Assange

I see the concepts spatially in my mind. I see the boxes and corrals and grids into which administrative systems require people, things and information to be fit in order to be legible, made to live, or in order to facilitate death and abandonment. — Dean Spade

Today, no one would dispute that information technology has become the backbone of commerce. It underpins the operations of individual companies, ties together far-flung supply chains, and, increasingly, links businesses to the customers they serve. Hardly a dollar or a euro changes hands anymore without the aid of computer systems. — Nicholas G. Carr

For example, in 2012 researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow uncovered a highly complex piece of malware known as Flame that had been pilfering data from information systems around the world for more than five years before it was detected. Mikko Hypponen, the well-respected chief research officer at the computer security firm F-Secure, called Flame a failure for the antivirus industry and noted he and his colleagues may be "out of their leagues in their own game." Though millions around the world rely on these tools, it's pretty clear the antivirus era is over. — Marc Goodman

Every computing device today has five basic components: (1) the integrated circuits that do the computing; (2) the memory units that store and retrieve information; (3) the networking systems that enable communications within and across computers; (4) the software applications that enable different computers to perform myriad tasks individually and collectively; and (5) the sensors - cameras and other miniature devices that can detect movement, language, light, heat, moisture, and sound and transform any of them into digitized data that can be mined for insights. — Thomas L. Friedman

In order to preserve a balance, while we aren't planning to build a missile defence of our own, as it's very expensive and its efficiency is not quite clear yet, we have to develop offensive strike systems. They [U.S.] should give us all the information about the missile defence, and we will be ready then to provide some information about offensive weapons. — Vladimir Putin

Activity is intelligence. We follow our information systems and we use our energy to get it done. And that's caused by a byproduct called matter. That's why I call it "energetic matter." And it's chemical matter. We are chemistry. — Horst Rechelbacher

Central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems. — Steven Levy

To look after a medieval estate, one required a map, an indexed account book and an abacus. For its time, this was a highly sophisticated geographical information system. Looking after the earth and each of its parts requires more data, a better index and more data processing. — Tom Turner

The cognitive sophistication of a mammalian species, in fact, is nicely predicted by the extent of the convergence that occurs in its cortex-more is present in humans than in monkeys, and more in monkeys than in rats. When plasticity occurs simultaneously in two regions that fed into a convergence zone, plasticity is also likely to occur in the convergence zone since it will be the recipient of the high level of activity that occurs when plasticity is being established in the individual regions. Obviously, synchrony and modulation also influence convergence zones, further increasing their potential to integrate information across systems. — Joseph E. Ledoux

I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants-silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves. — David Brooks

Progress in computer science is made with the distribution of revolutionary software systems and the publication of revolutionary books. We don't need a fancy information system to alert us to these grand events; they will hit us in the face. Another good excuse for ignoring the literature is that, since everyone has strong beliefs about fundamentals but can't support those beliefs rationally or consistently convince non-believers, computer science is actually a religion. — Philip Greenspun

We have discovered with our new information systems that we can make all the appropriate checks and ensure public safety is not dented in any way in a much shorter time frame. — Robert Carson

People tend to accept information that confirms their existing beliefs and feelings, and reject information that contradicts them. This is called "motivated reasoning," and it means that providing people with corrective information often does not work and may even strengthen their original beliefs. This also means that when people receive new information, their existing beliefs and feelings may have more influence over whether they believe or reject this information than rational reasoning. — Rachel Hilary Brown

The boundaries of these ecoranges, by the way, like the boundaries of all self-organized systems, are very porous. There is a constant flow of energy, and information, into and out of them. They are all tightly interwoven into the larger ecosystem of the Earth itself. Each acts locally, each acts globally. They are part of a highly complex and redundant system for maintaining the homeodynamis of the Earth. They develop more complexity over time, for the greater the complexity, the greater the ability to maintain homeodynamis. — Stephen Harrod Buhner

Radio astronomy reflects our fascination with how audio can be used to understand information or ideas. Just as scientists visualize data through charts and pictures, we can use 'data sonification' to translate radio signals into sound that help us better understand some of our most enigmatic planetary systems. — Honor Harger

Computers are the central access; information processing based on a spiral network, similar to that which is the chaos of existence itself, the analysis of systems, the interlocking lokas. — Frederick Lenz

Sometime in the future, science will be able to create realities that we can't even begin to imagine. As we evolve, we'll be able to construct other information systems that correspond to other realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time. — Robert Lanza

Japan has a fundamental problem with information itself: it's often lacking, and when it does exist, is fuzzy at its best, bogus at its worst. In this respect, Japan's traditional culture stands squarely at odds with modernity - and the problem will persist. The issue of hidden or falsified information strikes at such deeply rooted social attitudes that the nation may never entirely come to grips with it. Because of this, one may confidently predict that in the coming decades Japan will continue to have trouble digesting new ideas from abroad - and will find it more and more difficult to manage its own increasingly baroque and byzantine internal systems. — Alex Kerr

Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive. — David Holmgren

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born
the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. — Aldous Huxley

Decision-making compresses trial-and-error learning experiences into an instantaneous mental evaluation about what the consequence of a particular action will be for a given situation. It requires the on-line integration of information from diverse sources: perceptual information about the stimulus and situation, relevant facts and experiences stored in memory, feedback from emotional systems and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal, expectations about the consequences of different courses of action, and the like. This sort of integrative processing, as we've seen is the business of working memory circuits in the prefrontal cortex. In chapters 7 and 8 , we discussed the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory and considered the contribution of the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. Here, we will focus on two of the subareas of the medial prefrontal cortex in light of their relation to the motive circuits outlined above. — Joseph E. Ledoux

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use. — Noam Chomsky

That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems. — Paul Hawken

[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together — Kenneth E. Boulding

It is so irresponsible for people in the 'I want to change the course of my society' community to not do the damn research into figuring out the latest science of how people change their minds, and under what conditions people change their minds, and what exactly in their minds is being changed.

The belief systems people hold are absolutely, in no way, shape, or form the result of any objective evaluation of information. The prejudices are inherited, they're socially inflicted, they're propagandized in school, in church, in communities, in families. They are reinforced by endless bouts of patriotic media and all of this nonsense. People are an emotional Gordian knot kaleidoscopic clusterfrack of prior prejudices stuffed into their heads and held aloft by the spears of social approval and ostracism. — Stefan Molyneux

Flow systems have two basic features (properties). There is the current that is flowing (for example, fluid, heat, mass, or information) and the design through which it flows. — Adrian Bejan

The traditional boundaries between various fields of science are rapidly disappearing and what is more important science does not know any national borders. The scientists of the world are forming an invisible network with a very free flow of scientific information - a freedom accepted by the countries of the world irrespective of political systems or religions ... Great care must be taken that the scientific network is utilized only for scientific purposes - if it gets involved in political questions it loses its special status and utility as a nonpolitical force for development. — Sune Bergstrom

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities. — James Comey

Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. — Noam Chomsky

I started in the industry in Public Relations, Quality Assurance, Information Systems and furniture moving. I tried my hand in design and haven't looked back. I'm fond of hackysack, racquetball, BBQ grilling, hanging out with my wife and friends — Dan Miller

That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age. — Paul Hawken

And I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. — W.G. Sebald

We shall have to stop thinking of technology as something invulnerable that is merely used by humans, and view it as part of a greater cybernetic ecology all around us. The key distinction in an environment is not between 'natural' and 'artificial', but between semantic and dynamic: intention and behaviour. Biology has already drawn these lines, and through us, it will integrate the inanimate with the animate in information systems, until we no longer see a pertinent difference between the two. — Mark Burgess

You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it. — James Gleick

The pace of innovation continues to increase, and the Information Revolution holds a hint of what may lie ahead. Taken together, the parallels between APM-based production and digital information systems suggest that change in an APM era could be swift indeed - not stretched out over millennia, like the spread of agriculture, nor over centuries, like the rise of industry, nor even over decades, like the spread of the Internet's physical infrastructure. The prospect this time is a revolution without a manufacturing bottleneck, with production methods akin to sharing a video file. In other words, APM holds the potential for a physical revolution that, if unconstrained, could unfold at the speed of new digital media. — K. Eric Drexler

Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse. — Steven Johnson

I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next. — Peter Medawar

All descriptions of how near certainty is to be achieved are based primarily on emerging technologies. A Global Information Grid of "persistent surveillance" will gather information and share that information in a networked "collaborative information environment." Automated systems will fuse that intelligence and make possible "virtual collaboration among geographically dispersed" analysts who will generate intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge. Some even assume that this "robust intelligence" will deliver not only a clear appreciation for the current situation, but also generate "predictive intelligence" that will allow US forces to "anticipate the unexpected." Despite its enthusiastic embrace, the assumption of near-certainty in future war is a dangerous fallacy. — H.R. McMaster

Our problems are solvable if they are clearly defined. To do so, we need to monitor our planetary life support systems the way doctors monitor a patient's vital signs and then use that information to protect ecosystem services as though our lives depend on it, because they do. — Edith Widder

But withholding information about vulnerabilities in US systems so that they can be exploited in foreign ones creates a schism in the government that pits agencies that hoard and exploit zero days against those, like the Department of Homeland Security, that are supposed to help secure and protect US critical infrastructure and government systems. — Kim Zetter

Technologies that exist between man and nature in a simple form and those that enable the interaction with other technologies are becoming significantly more complex and create their own information systems. — Hubert Burda

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of. — Seth Lloyd

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth? — R. Buckminster Fuller

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. — Nick Harkaway