…say how impressed you are with how it was organized and ask for a round of applause for the organizer. This will ensure that whoever organized this event gets stuck with the next one, too, so that you don’t have to deal with it.

— Sarah Cooper, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings

for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do, either

— Plato, The Apology

Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Franklin Foer, World Without Mind

“It’s crazy what programmers, and even managers like me, have to learn every couple of years. Sometimes it’s a totally new database technology, a new programming or project management method, or a new technology delivery model, like cloud computing. “Just how many times can you throw out everything you know to keep up with the latest new-fangled trend? I look in the mirror every once in awhile, asking myself, ‘Will this be the year that I give up? Will I spend the rest of my career doing COBOL maintenance or become just another has-been middle manager?’

— Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, The Phoenix Project

…recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty-nine replicated.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game