Emergic: October 23, 2005 Archives

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Searching and Sorting Information

Atanu Dey writes in his ongoing series on the age of superfluous information:

There is already so much information out there that even if no additional information were generated, each one of us could be occupied a little longer than forever to finish it. Information, as we well know, is a non-rival good. That is, my “consuming” a particular piece of information will not diminish the amount available to you. Compare this to a rival good such as food. Stock of food is enough to last the six billion humans for about 3 months. In other words, if we produce no additional food, all together humans would finish the stock in three months. Or, a single human can therefore finish this in 1.5 billion years. But it is not so in the case of information. Each of us would take the estimated 18 billion years to finish the information we already have before we ask for more.

Clearly, for an average human, about 0.00000000001 percent of the total information stock is more than enough. About 99.9999999999 percent of the available information is worthless. So how does one go about searching out the teaspoonful of useful information from the oceans of available information. That is the challenge and therein lie the opportunities. That is why firms like Google will make the big bucks. The opportunity is not so much in making information available but making the right information available.

Which brings me to the point which I started off with. Searching is only part of the story when it comes to information. The other part is sorting. If one can sort the information along some relevant dimension, then you have meaningful information. What is meaningful can only be defined in the context of the entity processing the information.
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From the vantage point of an individual, this is an age of superfluous information; only a tiny fraction is relevant and meaningful; searching through the information can be automated but efficiently sorting for relevance is a private skill; imparting that skill is a primary function of education.

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I guess we need to differentiate between data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

Let me use an example to clarify this. Your doctor may have more information than you do, but this does not necessarily mean that he is more knowledgeable - leave alone wiser than you. Moreover, he may have more information about the disease, but you know much more about yourself, which means you are the expert on your personal illness. How wise you are about dealing with your problem depends upon you ! While it's easy to acquire information, and even knowledge, wisdom is a different cup of tea !

Data
Data itself is not very useful. Think of it as the “Know-nothing” stage.
We must understand what the data is ( for example, your blood sugar levels) and how to acquire it, which is where the medical expertise is valuable.

Data to Information
Once we can apply this data to our disease, the data becomes information. This is the “Know-what” stage. This is when the doctor makes a diagnosis, for example, by pattern recognition - by matching your symptoms with those described in a text book.

Information to Knowledge
Next, the information must be converted into knowledge by finding patterns within the information. Thus, charting your blood sugar levels in relation to time , meals and exercise makes it knowledge. This is the “Know-how” stage and helps you to gain insights into your illness and how it affects you. The knowledge can be generic and can be applied to most patients with a particular disease.

Knowledge to Wisdom
Wisdom arises when the knowledge is transformed into insight or principles. Once you understand the source of the patterns of your personal illness, you can learn to manage your own illness, with your doctor's help. This is the “Know-why” stage, and when you reach this stage, you become the true expert on your illness ! You can now share your wisdom with other patients - and your doctor, if he is wise enough to be willing to listen to you !

Search engines can help you sort and sift through the information, but you will need to make sense of it - and convert it to knowledge, and hopefully, even wisdom, for yourself ( with or without the help of a professional).

Posted by Aniruddha Malpani

The revolutions in ICT has lead to a decrease in the cost of replicating and disseminating information. It has not reduced the effort required for information to be incorporate in a brain into knowledge. It is an information revolution; it is arguably not a knowledge revolution. There is an explosion in information (some would argue that it is merely a data explosion) maybe but certainly not a knowledge explosion. Indeed, too much information – information overload – can lead to a decrease in knowledge acquired because humans have limited CPU power and if too much is used up in input of information, less CPU capacity is available for processing the information into useful knowledge.

I have explored this a bit here in Jan 2004.

Posted by Atanu Dey

Well said. I totally agree with you. The point you are making here does make sense.

Posted by Arnold

Dear Atanu,
You might have well been channeling some of the ideas that I have spoken and written about. This post adds more flesh to the amature of what I call the Cognitive Continuum, reflecting as you put it the evolution of data into wisdom. In trying to understand the dynamics of how people understand and then engage issues along this continnum, my position is that it is at the point of Knowledge that people are apt to act in their own enlightened self interest. The other addition to make here is that I think that Knowledge+Experience=Wisdon.
Great stuff! Very insightful.

Posted by Tunji Lardner

Payment for Peer Production

Michael Parekh writes:

The broader question for me is how users are eventually compensated for their "peer production" today and over time.

Payment for our peer participation and production to date on services like Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs and the like are primarily in non-cash terms.

Specifically they can be classified in the following categories:

1. Convenient functionality for all (e.g., Flickr, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia and of course, Google).
2. Reputation as in the case of bloggers, reviewers and commentators on the web (aka vanity).
3. Generosity, as highlighted by Tom Evslin in the discussion at the USV session. Good example here are the mostly anonymous contributions by countless folks to entries in Wikipedia.
4. Monetary compensation direct and indirect, as in the case of eBay sellers who get direct cash from sales and Google advertisers, who presumably get transactions from the leads they pay for through Adsense and Adwords on the service and affiliates.

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