I hadn’t considered the use of info-capturing institutions until recently, and in particular how prediction sites might help with this. If you have an insight or an update, there is cheap and standardised way to make it part of the world’s share knowledge.
The cheapness means you might actually do it. And the standardisation means it will interface more easily with the other parts of the info pipeline (easier to share, easier to preserve, easier to aggregate into established wisdom...)
According to the standard model of physics: information can’t be created or destroyed. I don’t know if science can be said to “generate” information rather than capturing it. It seems like you might be referring to a less formal notion of information, maybe “knowledge”.
Are short-forms really about information and knowledge? It’s my understanding that they’re about short thoughts and ideas.
I’ve been contemplating the value alignment problem and have come to the idea that the “telos” of life is to capture and preserve information. This seemingly implies some measure of the utility of information, because information that’s more relevant to the problem of capturing and preserving information is more important to capture and preserve than information that’s irrelevant to capturing and preserving information. You might call such a measure “knowledge”, but there’s probably already an information theoretic formalization of that word.
I have to admit, I don’t have a strong background in information theory. I’m not really sure if it even makes sense to discuss what some information is “about”. I think there’s something called the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy which may help sort that out. I think data is the bits used to store information. Like the information content of an un-compressed word document might be the same after compressing said document, it just takes up less data. Knowledge might be how information relates to other information, like you might think it takes one bit of information to convey whether the British are invading by land or by sea, but if you have more information about what factors into that decision, like the weather then the signal conveys less than one bit of information because you can make a pretty good prediction without it. In other words: our universe follows some rules and causal relationships so treating events as independent random occurrences is rarely correct. Wisdom, I believe; is about using the knowledge and information you have to make decisions.
There are different kinds of information instutitions.
Info-generating (e.g. Science, …)
Info-capturing (e.g. short-form? prediction markets?)
Info-sharing (e.g. postal services, newspapers, social platforms, language regulators, …)
Info-preserving (e.g. libraries, archives, religions, Chesterton’s fence-norms, …)
Info-aggregating (e.g. prediction markets, distill.pub...)
I hadn’t considered the use of info-capturing institutions until recently, and in particular how prediction sites might help with this. If you have an insight or an update, there is cheap and standardised way to make it part of the world’s share knowledge.
The cheapness means you might actually do it. And the standardisation means it will interface more easily with the other parts of the info pipeline (easier to share, easier to preserve, easier to aggregate into established wisdom...)
According to the standard model of physics: information can’t be created or destroyed. I don’t know if science can be said to “generate” information rather than capturing it. It seems like you might be referring to a less formal notion of information, maybe “knowledge”.
Are short-forms really about information and knowledge? It’s my understanding that they’re about short thoughts and ideas.
I’ve been contemplating the value alignment problem and have come to the idea that the “telos” of life is to capture and preserve information. This seemingly implies some measure of the utility of information, because information that’s more relevant to the problem of capturing and preserving information is more important to capture and preserve than information that’s irrelevant to capturing and preserving information. You might call such a measure “knowledge”, but there’s probably already an information theoretic formalization of that word.
I have to admit, I don’t have a strong background in information theory. I’m not really sure if it even makes sense to discuss what some information is “about”. I think there’s something called the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy which may help sort that out. I think data is the bits used to store information. Like the information content of an un-compressed word document might be the same after compressing said document, it just takes up less data. Knowledge might be how information relates to other information, like you might think it takes one bit of information to convey whether the British are invading by land or by sea, but if you have more information about what factors into that decision, like the weather then the signal conveys less than one bit of information because you can make a pretty good prediction without it. In other words: our universe follows some rules and causal relationships so treating events as independent random occurrences is rarely correct. Wisdom, I believe; is about using the knowledge and information you have to make decisions.
Take all that with a grain of salt.