Infovation: Working with Information, Part 1
A fundamental feature of the information world is that it is both excessive and insufficient at the same time. In this situation, finding something truly necessary and important becomes increasingly difficult. This very problem has led to the search for a method of working with information in the modern world, which is increasingly becoming a world of imagined reality.
Infovation is a methodologically grounded approach to working with information that takes into account the origin of information, its medium, the goals and objectives of the message, as well as the role and capabilities of the interpreter when receiving informational components. Infovation is based on information theory, epistemology, and cognitive neurobiology. The main tasks of infovation lie in the field of systematizing information and developing toolkits for working with it in order to obtain new, verifiable knowledge.
On a practical level, it makes sense to view information as a form of organizational interaction of representations of reality, which will be discussed further below.
Infovation does not contradict traditional science, but it emphasizes not what is being studied, but how the material is being studied.
The “Infovation Handbook” is equipped with numerous examples (both thematic and random) to make it easier to understand the general algorithms of working with information. The handbook also includes additional explanatory chapters, which allow for a deeper understanding of the theoretical prerequisites for the emergence of infovation.
First Aid: The Anti-Virus
The best starting point for working with information is to accept Socrates’ thesis: “I know that I know nothing.” To avoid the fatalistic undertones of this statement and to see how its meaning can change depending on context, it’s worth remembering the continuation: “I know that I know nothing, but many do not even know this.” Realizing that our knowledge is very limited and distorted is a huge step toward understanding the world and our own capabilities.
Conscious Deconstruction
The human brain always brings something of its own to the interpretation of the world: memories, experience, beliefs, and knowledge. Thus, the interpretation of information from the outside world is always influenced by internal filters, so-called paradigms (stable models of perception). Paradigms help simplify the world and “comb” it into a picture that is acceptable for perception. At the same time, they naturally exclude much that does not fit into the Usual Picture of the World (UPW).
Education plays a huge role in forming paradigms, essentially creating a powerful sorting filter: perceive/do not perceive. Years of schooling and university create a highly stable picture of what is allowed to be perceived. But what is taught in schools and universities today? And how is it taught? Opinions differ, but overall, the level of education is said to be declining. This means that paradigms are becoming simpler and can only perceive flat, superficial information.
In general, the Usual Picture of the World is formed over decades: some things are added, destroyed, or updated, but most remain within familiar meanings and judgments. To break out of familiar paradigms, you need to stop recalling. But the brain works by recalling and comparing with what it already knows. This process brings old meaning into new information. It’s almost impossible to “negotiate” with the brain or convince it to perceive things differently; it functions as it knows how. In culture, this is symbolized by the Ouroboros — the snake eating its own tail.
So, what to do with your own carefully cultivated Ouroboros, which strictly controls perception and, therefore, what can or cannot be known? Since the Ouroboros is a systemic and cyclical image, working with it should also be systematic.
The goal is to create systemic prerequisites for deconstructing what you already know and what influences your perception of new information. Essentially, this is the work of conscious deconstruction — an organized activity aimed at changing perception. The task is to tear apart the Usual Picture of the World, to present information in such a way that you can’t just recall, but have to think and “exercise your brain.” And to be surprised at how mistaken you were before.
Believing in Incompleteness
The process of “exercising your brain” can be organized quite simply by using a basic questioning method. The questions to ask when studying an object are familiar from childhood:
- WHO?
- WHAT?
- WHERE?
- WHEN?
- HOW MANY?
- HOW?
These are primary questions. Over time, each will generate many new clarifying questions. However, as soon as a person starts gathering information systematically and according to a plan of questions that makes sense to them, the object begins to reveal new connections and colors. With these simple questions, you can inventory what you know about your topic and also realize what you don’t know or haven’t even considered. Collecting information by questions allows you to create a kind of “module” of accompanying data. The object of study becomes surrounded by systemic connections and is integrated into various contexts: thematic, chronological, event-based, personalized, etc. This is where deconstruction begins. Contexts intertwine, and inconsistencies, surprises, and ambiguities emerge. Understanding the incompleteness of your knowledge comes through personal experience and forces your brain to “exercise,” that is, to think.
With questions, it’s easy to detail and sort information by personalized topics (WHO/WHAT), which helps create a more structured picture of previously known facts. Answers to “WHERE/WHEN” provide a more precise understanding of the spatial and temporal changes of the object. Answers to “HOW MANY/HOW” can give extensive information about quantitative and qualitative changes. Comparing information collections by space-time data with quantitative-qualitative data almost automatically leads to questions about technology, logistics, communications, and allows you to notice something new in already known material. The brain is then forced to accept the existence of new (previously ignored) facts: it found them itself in the vast informational sea.
This means you won’t have to whisper to yourself, “see things differently, perceive in a new way.” We know such pleas don’t work on the brain. Here, changes in perception and understanding of the depth of your own ignorance come more from surprise: “Why have I never thought about this before?!”
Thus, answers to questions allow you to form around the studied fact informational modules of interconnected data, which are essentially like a hologram — a three-dimensional representation of information, where any part, through its connections, leads to an understanding of the whole.
The “Sieve” of Questions
Below is a brief overview of how to work with information using the so-called “sieve” of primary questions.
For simplicity, the questions can be presented as a diagram:
After describing the possibilities of each question, you can look at examples for better understanding.
The WHAT Question
Paradoxically, people often cannot clearly formulate the object of their research, let alone identify related topics. Some unsystematized facts are simply lost and forgotten in the general mosaic of information. Creating lists (catalogs) of found artifacts, sources, structures, etc., allows you to form the primary outline of the research. This outline will then be integrated into context through people and their connections, time and its constraints, territory and its resources, technology, and logistics channels.
Answers to WHAT clarify the essence of the research and focus it on a specific topic.
The WHO Question
Answers to WHO focus on the object of study through the lens of specific people and their connections. It is in these connections that meaning necessary for understanding information can be found. Answers to WHO allow you to reconstruct the connectedness of events and processes through the connectedness of people.
For example, the “WHO — WITH WHOM” connection provides a wealth of material for searching for possible causes of observed events. These connections can be very diverse:
- who studied, lived, traveled, worked, communicated, fought, served, played, painted, etc. with whom;
- who helped, patronized, gave, gifted, hindered, avenged whom;
- who gave birth to, killed, buried, found, warned, deceived, betrayed, outplayed whom;
- and so on.
In each case, when evaluating a person, there will naturally be possible questions. You just need to learn to run a cascade of questions in your mind, sorting them into: know/don’t know.
The WHERE Question
Answers to WHERE allow you to tie the object of study to a specific territory, to changes occurring there, and to the resources available in that location. They also provide food for thought about potential movements of the object. Having a “map” of movements (of a person, object, army, etc.) makes you think about lifestyle, logistics, communications, and so on, which sparks new leads in the research.
The WHEN Question
Answers to WHEN help form a chronology of changes in the object’s state, that is, to reconstruct the sequence of events. There are many criticisms of chronology today, perhaps deservedly so. In any case, schools instill a certain chronological vision, or rather, a mass of unrelated dates and events. Answers to WHEN, combined with other questions, allow you to look at the object more soberly and skeptically. Each person has their own set of disciplinary knowledge and beliefs, which determines their level of skepticism toward traditional chronology.
The HOW MANY Question
Answers to HOW MANY provide food for thought about the uniqueness or mass nature of processes, quantitative results, productivity, and efficiency of processes. This is a very interesting type of data, which can also be used for various statistical models and probability calculations.
The HOW Question
Answers to HOW are essentially about technology, logistics, and communication. Often, these questions are ignored in studies of the past. Instead of answers, various ways of “crossing out” information or presenting impossible explanations as obvious are used.
Answers to HOW are actually the trickiest and most complex, but they allow you to double-check the likelihood of described events and changes in the object of study.
With a primary information base, you can begin to clarify and expand it using more complex compositional questions, which will be discussed further in the handbook chapter “Additional Features of the Anti-Virus.”
All these simple operations, during the initial sifting of information, help break the automatism of perception provided by thinking paradigms. This is, in essence, a way to understand your own illusions about what you know and don’t know. Of course, you should also consider the peculiarity of human perception, which is influenced by memory. Most information is not perceived, but recalled (by finding suitable analogs in memory). In fact, people recall that they supposedly know something about a phenomenon, event, or period, which is not always true.
Information collected using the “sieve” of questions helps partially weaken the influence of memory on the object of study, that is, to interrupt “recollections” about the activities of an enterprise, people, or situations. In essence, this is a personal weakening of your own Ouroboros. All the data collected can then be combined, for example, by overlaying technological features with personalized information to look for correlations, such as WHAT is done better in the presence of WHOM, and HOW this affects the overall result (HOW MANY). A careful analysis like this, done once, can forever sow doubts about the simple “replaceability” of people in an organization, which is a trendy management idea today. It also allows you to optimally use the potential of certain people for specific tasks. All the data collected with the “sieve” will present the situation in a new way: in interconnections and details. Naturally, this provides material for reflection and allows for a more thoughtful attitude toward people, situations, and processes.
To be continued in the next “Infovation” article.