A Commonplace Book

The more information one has to evaluate, the less one knows.

The more you know, the less you understand.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us.... [T]he world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!

Schools are not now and have never been largely about getting information to children. That has been on the schools' agenda, of course, but has always been way down on the list. For technological utopians, the computer vaults information-access to the top.... The goal of giving people more information faster, more conveniently and in more diverse forms was the main technological thrust of the nineteenth century. Some folks haven't noticed it but that problem was largely solved, so that for almost a hundred years there has been more information available to the young outside the school than inside. That did not make schools obsolete, nor does it now make them obsolete.... [The] problem is not how to get access to a well-structured algebra lesson but what to do with all the information available...

The dissonance occurs only when one tries to imagine these same adventurers standing in a library, surrounded in three dimensions by records of human achievement far surpassing what is now Net-accessible. Would there, in these surroundings, be the same, breathless investigation of every room and shelf, the same shouts of glee at finding this collection of art prints or that provocative series of essays or these journalistic reports on current events?

To study mind, we must become comfortable with the fact that mind generally does not work the way it appears to. This sounds paradoxical. We expect our introspective sense of mind to serve as a reasonable guide to the actual nature of mind. We expect it to give us a loose picture that, once enhanced by science, will represent the workings of mind. But it is instead badly deceptive. Our loose picture of mind is a loose fantasy. Consciousness is a wonderful instrument for helping us to focus, to make certain kinds of decisions and discriminations, and to create certain kinds of memories, but it is a liar about mind. It shamelessly represents itself as comprehensive and all-governing, when in fact the real work is often done elsewhere, in ways too fast and too smart and too effective for slow, dumb, unreliable consciousness to do more than glimpse, dream of, and envy.

The measuring, the obtaining of information is not what costs at all. What costs is getting rid of that information again. Knowledge is not what costs. Wisdom does.

Calculation is a method of getting rid of information in which you are not interested. You throw away what is not relevant.

This contradicts our everyday perception of information as being something highly positive, a good. We are accustomed to viewing information as a positive thing, but his may well be completely unreasonable -- a prejudice that affects man on the threshold of the information society.

For example, you are standing at the checkout at a supermarket. Your purchases are being totaled. Each item in your basket has a price. The cashier enters each price, adds them, and arrives at a sum -- a total price of, say, $27.80. This amount is the result of a calculation involving the addition of lots of numbers.

What contains the most information, the sum or the calculation itself? The sum is one number ($27.80), while the calculation was a collection of several numbers -- twenty-three different prices, say. We might feel that on the face of it there must be more information in the result, because when we did sums at school our teacher instructed us to come up with the right answer.

But in fact there is far less information in the result than in the problem: After all, there are lots of different combinations of goods that can lead to the same total price. But that does not mean you can guess what is in each basket if you know only the price.

What we perceive at any moment, therefore, is limited to an extremely small compartment in the stream of information about our surroundings flowing in from the sense organs.

We can therefore conclude that the maximal information flow of the process of conscious sensory perception is about 40 bits/second -- many orders of magnitude below that taken in by receptors [nerve endings].

... we have to remember we cannot ponder all paths but must decode only those necessary to get out. We must be quick and anything but exhaustive.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Funes there was nothing but particulars -- and they were virtually immediate particulars.

In all, books and paper documents set a useful precedent not only for document design, but for information technology design in general. In a time of abundant and even superabundant raw information, they suggest that the better path in creating social documents (and social communities) lies not in the direction of increasing amounts of information and increasingly full representation, but rather in leaving increasing amounts un- or underrepresented. Efficient communication relies not on how much can be said, but on how much can be left unsaid -- and even unread in the background.

What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

First, the idea of the multiverse is essentially the fantasy of preserving perfect information. One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say that's essentially what regret is: a profound problem of incomplete information.

I hate those monographs which, instead of letting the author speak and staying close to the text, engage in obscure elucubrations which claim to carry out an act of decoding and reveal the "unsaid" of the thinker, without the reader's having the slightest idea of what that thinker really "said." Such a method unfortunately permits all kinds of deformations, distortions, and sleight of hand.

Our era... could be defined as the era of the misinterpretation... [P]eople can, it seems, say anything about anything. When I quote Marcus Aurelius, I want my reader to make contact with the text itself, which is superior to any commentary. I would like him to see how my interpretation tries to base itself on the text, and that he can verify my affirmations directly and immediately.

Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce, replace, emblemize. Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do... Without such tools, the world would be presenting us, constantly, with occasions so abundantly and elaborately informative as to be crippling.