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Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - 7:03 AM
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"We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive." — George Dyson. (I'd heard of his pop and his sister but not of him.)
This wasn't always the case. I remember reading in Braudel's history of the Mediterranean that in 16th century Europe, information was mighty expensive. One example that struck me (if I am recalling Braudel correctly) was that sending a letter from Spain to Paris cost the equivalent of a university professor's annual salary. Now sending that e-mail is basically free. On the other hand, no one got spammed back in 1550.
I think that what this blog should try to be about is making sense of new information. I march forward with new resolve!
That a modern person is exposed to more information in one day than a medieval peasant experienced in a lifetime.
Most youths these days don't seek real knowedgable and useful info. They just want entertainment and gossip - Sean B.
There is a lot of meaning in human interaction, as well as in the natural world. I wonder how much meaning the modern person gets vs. that medieval peasant?
Best,
Tom
Otzi the Iceman who died about 5000 years ago on a mountain between Italy and Austria was dressed in the skins of sundry animals, covered by a warm grass cloak. His shoes were waterproof, their upper being bearskin the soles deerskin. A netting made from tree bark covered the uppers Reebok style. Their shape suggests they were designed for walking on snow. He carried a copper axe, six types of wood, and antibacterial medicine. He was tattooed. All this 4000 years before medieval peasants came along. A druggist in Iraq about 4000 years ago inscribed in cuneiform on clay a list of the medicines used then that included marijuana and birchtree bark (which aspirin copies). The identity of the other drugs cannot yet be translated. Doubtless the leading lights of that time were just as smugly confident that they had attained a peak of human achievement as many do today.
Elsewhere, scientific grave robbers have established that individuals were dressed for burial in artefacts and precious substances that came from trading routes that drew on the resources of much of Europe and Asia. This without aircraft or FedEx.
As to modern scientific knowledge, it's notable that the discovery of mummified, armed Otzi on a European mountain 20 years ago forced the best scientists of the day to abandon their confident belief that humanity entered the copper Age only 4000 years ago.
As to the cost of meaning, just how much meaning do you think has been extracted from that closing military adventure in Iraq? Much less, I fear, than the cost in blood, grief and treasure. Much, much less.
I am being asked to blog at work and wasn't sure people really cared what I had to say, especially once thousands of us start blogging. Your comments give me new insight as to how I could approach this request. Still not sure anyone will care, but thanks for the perspective.
Heard around the Content Factory
Parallel sentiments oft-spoken here: "Writing is easy. Content is hard."
as noted on day 1. We are graded on "contribution, not participation. Many people participate and still contribute little."
My guess would be that the amount of meaning a person can absorb is relatively fixed. We're working with the same brains after all. There will be some variation among individuals, and perhaps education can inch that innate capacity upward. But I can't imagine either the peasant or the modern human would have an advantage in those terms.
Given that, the limiting factor becomes how much information is available from which to draw meaning. As you noted, there's really no comparison in that regard.
Combine the two, and the modern person in indisputably better off — despite all the complaining about the difficulty of finding meaning. Yes, it's inconvenient to sift through all that information and bad sources. But that's also a luxury that wasn't an option just a few decades ago. Just consider, we know far more about the Iraq War mid-conflict than we did about World War II.
Basically we've moved from an environment of expensive information/expensive meaning to cheap information/expensive meaning.
And I'd argue even that is overly pessimistic. There is ample raw data out there for those who have the desire to interpret it themselves—everything from Wikileaks documents to climatological data. Don’t have the skills or desire to do that analysis yourself? Any number of experts are offering free, in-depth breakdowns that the layman would never have been able to access until the advent of blogging. Just look at all the guest bloggers Tom lassos for this blog.
I’m an editor for an exclusively online news company. No one knows better than people in my position just how cheap meaning has become. I still spend a lot of time on stories produced by professional journalists that add context and present divergent viewpoints. But an increasingly large part of my job involves co-opting experts who are quite happy to present their analysis — for free — in far more detail than I had the luxury of doing as a reporter. When it’s a controversial issue, opposing parties can present their opinions with same level of detail once reserved for Lincoln-Douglas-esque debates.
Meaning is so cheap that my site will die if it sticks to professionally reported news, as organizations did when I attended journalism school. The only way to survive is to make the site a portal that gathers all that meaning together at a low cost approaching free. There are still efficiency gains as sites work out the best business models to collect information, draw meaning from it and disseminate it — "journalism," in other words — but the era of cheap meaning is here.
Just because you don't pay for it . . . .
. . . . doesn't mean it is cheap.
Maybe you aren't paying the experts you quote, but someone is. Either an institution, or people who want consultants in that area. Or, closer to home, who buy the books they write.
Also, someone pays you, right?
So I'd want to hear more before concluding that "the era of cheap meaning is here." Still, an interesting response. You made me re-think Dyson's assertion.
Thanks,
Tom
Yes, I get paid. Those experts also get paid — many of them quite handsomely (although not by me). But you're not considering per-unit cost.
A good blog could reach several thousand readers—maybe much more, usually much less. An organization like the New York Times or the Huffington Post can bring those opinions to millions. The cost is significant but they're divvied among many advertisers and, if the company has a pay wall, many readers. Throw in personal blogs, and these experts are effectively donating their knowledge, although perhaps with the intent of marketing themselves and increasing their personal brand and value.
Now compare that to the recent past, when expert viewpoints would have been confined to arcane journals. The Lancet's 2007 print circulation—the latest I could find—was just 29,103. A one-year subscription right now cost $211. That's cost-prohibitive for a layman who just wants to investigate one particular study or compare efficacy of treatment.
So these experts are getting paid but:
a) Their pay is a fixed cost that they'd be getting whether they're sharing that expertise with 10 people, 1,000 or 1 million. Just like with technology, you achieve cost efficiencies as your reach expands.
b) Public information sharing is often ancillary to the duties for which they're getting paid for. A diplomat who posts on your site is getting paid to be a diplomat and would get paid to do that even if he or she didn't post on your site. That he or she does so is an increase in information without a corresponding increase in cost.
You said:
"My guess would be that the amount of meaning a person can absorb is relatively fixed. We're working with the same brains after all. There will be some variation among individuals, and perhaps education can inch that innate capacity upward. But I can't imagine either the peasant or the modern human would have an advantage in those terms."
The jury is out on that. Some studies have shown that each succeeding generation is smarter than the previous generation by 10 to 15 IQ points. I will acknowledge there are problems with that particular measurement, but it does provide a raw score for comparison.
We might be seeing evolution in action, or maybe we're not. Our methods of measuring what the brain does is still in the beginner stages, so we shall see. The greater data available may be forcing our brains to evolve faster in order to deal with it.
"Some studies have shown that each succeeding generation is smarter than the previous generation by 10 to 15 IQ points," and others might argue that this is just as likely a crackpot belief among people who sincerely believe they can really measure generational intelligence on a strict point scale -- obvious madness seemingly designed to make experts look important.
I see no modern Asoka, Shakespeare or Leonardo and don't rate, say, Steve Jobs highly against the shaggy guy who invented the wheel or learned that we could turn grassy weeds into major life-sustaining crops. That latter discovery, by shaggy ladies likely. While at the same time they were inventing ... fabric made from weeds and animal skins, and handmade thread.
In the classic phrase, all new generations stand on the shoulders of giants. We will never learn who most of them were.
Indeed, open source information is cheap, but meaning is expensive . . . Just as the distinction should be made between intelligence collection and intelligence analysis . . . Without understanding what's coming-in, most information is irrelevant or at best trivial.
In differentiating between information that is of real value and the vast quantity of information which is not only irrelevant, but may also be put out to deceive, Roberta Wohlstetter would describe it in terms of separating signals (meaning) versus background noise (information).
How do I manage all the information I'm bombarded with? I'm still working at it just like everyone else. . .Why just the other day I had a hankering for Chinese food and called an advertisement I'd seen in the paper, the voice on the other end said, "I had reached the wong restaurant. . .know what I'm say'en here dog?
It was a diplomatic letter with a reply (1560) sent from Chartres to Toledo including a return to Chartres for 1288 miles and 179 stages. This was 16th century equivalent of pedal to the metal. Just rental on the horses would eat up half of it.
Regular commercial letters were significantly slower and took three to four weeks one way and much, much cheaper.
"Average speed of travelers on horseback, 40 kilometers a day, in the mail coach 90." Fast couriers to Italy between 170 and 200 km/day from France or Spain.
SO - fast diplomatic courier service was 5 times faster than the average horse traveler or twice as fast as a mail coach and you clearly paid for the service.
Service speed was limited by horse flesh and some to quality of roads but stayed the same, more or less, for 500 years.
"We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive." — George Dyson.
And it's growing exponentially (which is why I went back to school). Making sense of all that data is going to be big in the years ahead. FYI, for a discussion on the difference between data and information: http://bit.ly/w1Te5u
Process and interpret all that great data and you get this kind of stuff: http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
It's moderately useful, and will get more so in the future. Also check out Sergy Brin's efforts re Parkinsons. Can find a link if anyone is interested.
we were taught the difference between information and intelligence. Basically, intelligence is culled, validated, and analyzed information. Today, in a fusion center one can be inundated with signals, imagery, human, terrain, and Internet information. It's fashionable to refer to the task as connecting the dots. The humans who do a good job at this are both intelligent and adept at multiprocessing.
They might also possess intuition! Frequently you will see an indicator and ask or be asked, "What does this mean?" Just think what your brain must be doing to come up with an answer. It draws upon memory and experience and tries to think what other assets cab be brought to bear to cme up with the likely answer. Inferior or lazy analysts will provide a quick answer beased upon shallow thinking. Others will dig deeper. Then there are the bosses who want it fast and have no clue how that can result in the wrong meaning.
The parameter that does not change is time. Maybe that's wrong as we keep moving faster and, therefore, need the intelligence sooner. As the number of sources increase and their volume increases the task becomes more difficult - but the likelihood of being able to get the right answer increases as well - if the analysts can handle it. It's like culling drops from a fire hose.
I've always thought of input as random. Even an intense, directed study bent on finding data about a particular thing invariably results in random input about that thing. There's no right order. And that random order causes connections to be made and conclusions to be drawn that I'm certain differ from what they would have been had data been absorbed in a different order. When one considers that data points are inevitably missed or never seen, one has to question the validity of all conclusions.
Add to all that the random flow of off-topic data that just cascades from all sources within reach at any given moment. Some of it resonates against the flow of a directed data search and illuminates, even shapes, conclusions drawn from that search.
And add to that the way random events and disposition combined to shape my
own idiosynratic information-processing engine.
I feel as if I am a product of all the data I have absorbed, one conclusion leading to another, and so forth, until, at a fairly advanced age, I realize it's all serendipitous. And that I might have gotten it all wrong.
Information is quite cheap now and you can make the argument that meaning is expensive. I work at a school, however, and I am surprised by how quickly the students grasp the concept of skeptism and thinking things through for themselves. I think the ability to make meaning for yourself will always outweigh the value of information.
Thanks for this cute quoteof the day . It got me thinking!
In our age, ingredients are cheap, but eating out is expensive.
Or . . .
In our age, publishers are cheap, but books are expensive.
Or . . .
In our age, talk is cheap, but libel suits are expensive.
On the Iceman and peasants, I tell my students, humans then had the same brains we have today with the same capabilities.
The major difference in this generation and previous ones is access to information and technology. A main learning object we have today with students is teaching them to do more than to access and collect information, but to sort through the information and analysis not only the information but a higher priority, the source.
SF Vet, I loved your definitions. My understanding is a major problem the previous administration had with Iraq was they were looking at information and not intelligence.
You said information is cheap?
Great post
You said Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive? yes i'm agree with you. and now the most people in around the world have information over load too., ipad2 black friday thanks for have posted.
Thomas C.
black Friday ipad2
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