How could I be THIS STUPID???
Now, please stop reading and remember when you asked this, not just lightly but with the strange mix of real anger and shame.
...
That was the last time you learned something really important and this is the only way to it. It happened to me yesterday. At age 52 I think this is a very positive feedback: I can (very hardly but still) lower my ego and learn. Here is the story.
I have been repeating for years in every context that JCR Licklider separated transferrable and non-transferrable knowledge, and a root cause of today's mess in IT (and consequently, everywhere) is the fact that we forgot this. Banging my chest like a gorilla, like here...
But yesterday, as my young colleague is creating a proper scientific publication, we started looking for the exact reference. To my greatest surprise, I did not find it. In desperation, I started reading Libraries of the Future again, and realized (thankfully and ironically on page 2!) that...
Licklider never wrote that.
Here is the actual quote:
We delimited the scope of the study, almost at the outset, to functions, classes of information, and domains of knowledge in which the items of basic interest are not the print or paper, and not the words and sentences themselves —but the facts, concepts, principles, and ideas that lie behind the visible and tangible aspects of documents. The criterion question for the delimitation was: "Can it be rephrased without significant loss?" Thus we delimited the scope to include only "transformable information." Works of art are clearly beyond that scope, for they suffer even from reproduction. Works of literature are beyond it also, though not as far. Within the scope lie secondary parts of art and literature, most of history, medicine, and law, and almost all of science, technology, and the records of business and government.
He talks about "transformable information", not "transferrable knowledge".
What happened? Had I forgotten to read???
No, but I was not able to at that moment. This paragraph held a key to a question of computerized knowledge management I struggled with for decades, literally. When it hit me, my mind was blown immediately and started restructuring itself. I followed, remembered, and kept quoting my own revelation instead of the text that I thought I was reading.
But why?
Knowledge in our minds is always a network: some attributes of and relations between "things". To store or transfer our knowledge of a topic, we "export" the related part of this network in a presentation, text, figures, pictures, videos. Other people will try to integrate this content with their existing knowledge. Here comes the trick: for those who can do this without changing anything in their minds, this was not "information" because information is only the part that you did not know and could not figure out from your existing knowledge.
At the first time I could not integrate Licklider's original message with my existing knowledge, it only triggered a change that took a long time. Now, when I revisited this paragraph, it was new again but now I could actually read it and integrate with my current knowledge. Fun fact: the word "respect" does not mean "obey" or "accept" but re-specto: examine it again.
Real information is like good chilli: it burns twice.
So, how do I read the message now?
This is a simple way to tell the difference between transformable and non-transformable information. I quoted the rest correctly: informatics (the "libraries of the future") should work only with transformable information.
- Transformable means you can say it hundreds of ways, the meaning will be the same. You focus on the knowledge graph in your head and try to build exactly the same in the audience: a physical phenomenon or a medical treatment.
- Non-transformable information focuses on the message itself and the feelings created by it (not less important but totally different). With different tone, wording, or face, the message and the effect significantly changes.
A less nerdy example
I think 99% of modern pop music is not even information: repeats the same message about a boy, girl, love, hate, etc. that the audience is already familiar. (hashtag metoo?)
But the Sound of Silence is a perfect example of non-transformable information: I already knew the original song but this presentation by Disturbed delivered the message (which happens to be in close relation with the topic of this post).
[This post can be a pair of my more formal article, The Science of Being Wrong (a possible definition of informatics) as here I defined "infonauts" as experts in being wrong...]
